News In Brief: Biomedical Briefing

Money for marrow A US federal appeals court last month overturned a 27-year-old law barring the sale of bone marrow, ruling that people can be financially compensated for their tissue, as they are for blood and sperm donations. The court found that new methods of harvesting marrow-derived stem cells from the bloodstream—rather than the bone—did not amount to an invasive organ collection akin to donating a kidney. “The court's decision will fundamentally change treatment options for people with deadly blood diseases,” says attorney Jeff Rowes from the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Virginia, who represented the plaintiffs arguing that monetary incentives of around $3,000 were crucial to help with the difficulty of finding genetically matched marrow. See go.nature.com/szuEdw for more.

NHS meet pharma A major UK government push to bring new drugs and medical technologies to market could soon put reams of medical data into the hands of British biomedical researchers. The UK Department of Health announced plans on 5 December to make patient records from the country's National Health Service (NHS) available to academics and companies conducting clinical research, with an opportunity for people to opt out of the system. The government also earmarked £180 million ($280 million) for a 'biomedical catalyst fund' to support translational research aimed at bridging the so-called 'valley of death', £130 million for research into biomarker-driven personalized therapies and £50 million to build a new cell therapy technology innovation center in London.

Pancreas plan Responding to pressure from the New York–based Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation—which led a campaign demanding regulatory guidance for how to test artificial pancreases—the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month outlined a new path to bring the devices to market. An artificial pancreas combines glucose monitors and insulin pumps to help people with type 1 diabetes control their blood sugar levels around the clock. In draft guidelines released on 1 December, the agency promised to be flexible when it comes to the clinical trial sizes, durations and endpoints needed for approval. The guidance “will assist investigators in navigating the regulatory waters toward the development of viable, safe and effective autonomous insulin delivery systems,” says Boston University biomedical engineer Ed Damiano, who created an artificial pancreas that is currently in clinical development.......

Research
Bioengineered tracheas help people breath easy A 36-year-old Eritrean man is breathing more easily thanks to the first successful implantation of a synthetic, stem cell–seeded trachea. Three years ago, a team led by Paolo Macchiarini from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm created a tissue-engineered windpipe using a cadaver trachea seeded with a patient's own blood stem cells. Now, Macchiarini and his colleagues have repeated the feat using a nanocomposite polymer as a scaffold. Reporting last month in The Lancet (378, 1997–2004, 2011), they found that the bioartificial airway formed a new epithelial layer with no complications five months after the transplant. “Every new tissue implantation success validates the scaffold technology, and this shows the method is sound across a range of pathologies,” says Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who has transplanted tissue-engineered bladders and urethras. In November, a 30-year-old Baltimore man traveled to Stockholm for a nearly identical operation, and further bioengineered trachea transplants are scheduled for the coming months, says Macchiarini.

Read Full Article

Source: Nature Medicine