New Organ and Organ Preservation Alliance Announce the Vascular Tissue Challenge and Other Initiatives in Organ Engineering

The US government is beginning to make more of an overt show of supporting tissue engineering, cryobiology, and other areas that can help move the needle in the field of organ transplantation, as demonstrated by today's White House Organ Summit. It will take some time to see how this pans out; typically the immediate outcome of this sort of public-private partnership is that it becomes easier for private and philanthropic initiatives at the cutting edge to raise funds for projects that can advance the state of the art. Familiarity with the field and its goals spreads, and that helps, as fundraising is always slower when you have to start with an explanation of the basics of what it is you are actually doing. Government funding sources tend to get directly involved only in the much less risky and much later stages of development, however, and that funding typically has much more to do with delivery of existing technology than implementation of new technology. You can look back at comparable US government efforts from past decades, such as the nanotechnology initiative back in 2004, and draw your own conclusions. For biotechnology, one high level goal for the next twenty years is to generate a much larger and more reliably, high-quality supply of organs and tissues for transplantation. That could be achieved to some degree through better storage methodologies, such as reversible vitrification that would allow indefinite storage of large tissue sections, or through improv...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs