Our last podcast featured the bioengineer responsible for much of today’s artificial heart technology. Now meet Dr. Robert Kormos, a clinician who has used those artificial hearts to help people survive until donor hearts were available. Some patients even recovered enough heart function to eliminate the need for transplantation. Dr. Kormos is the [...]

Twenty years ago, a pioneering team of clinicians and engineers had a vision to use a mechanical heart-assist device as an aid to a patient with a failing heart, and to ascertain if such a heart assist device could serve as a “bridge” for an ailing heart until a transplantable organ became available. [...]

Fifty years ago, Uncas Whitaker – the founder of the Harrisburg, PA-based electrical connector company AMP -- foresaw what engineers could do for medicine and human health. In 1975, he established a nonprofit foundation to help advance medical science and heal the sick and injured. Until its planned closing in summer 2006, the [...]

In podcast #16, learn about two technologies that help keep tissues oxygenated in dire times. Dr. William Federspiel is developing devices that do some of the lungs’ critical work of adding oxygen to blood and removing carbon dioxide. These aren’t ventilators, which mechanically inflate the lungs with air, but small devices that can [...]

In podcast #15, we’ll meet two researchers with very different approaches to tissue regeneration. We met both at the 2006 Regenerate World Congress in April. First we’ll hear from Dr. Kevin Shakesheff  of the University of Nottingham. He is developing new scaffolds from a familiar material: polylactic acid, the same stuff that makes [...]

In podcast #14 we’ll meet two more researchers who visited Pittsburgh for the 2006 Regenerate World Congress. Dr. Malla Padidam of the biotech company RheoGene (now merged with Intrexon Corporation) describes their gene switch, a molecule that can turn a gene on or off at a particular time to precisely guide the growth of [...]

Bone Tissue Engineering In podcast #13, we talk with Professor Jöns Hilborn and Dr. Ivan Martin, two experts in bone tissue engineering who attended the 2006 Regenerate World Congress in April. Professor Hilborn of the Department of Materials Chemistry at Sweden’s Uppsala University is engineering cells to produce customized extracellular matrices, which his [...]

Science Outside the Laboratory In podcast #12, we talk with two more experts who attended the 2006 Regenerate World Congress in April: policy advisor Dr. David Williams and Ms. Mary Ann Liebert, a publisher. Dr. Williams is an internationally recognized scientist and a leader in the development of policy and regulations related to regenerative [...]

The First Laboratory-Grown Organ Dr. Anthony Atala made headlines in April 2006 when he announced that his team had successfully grown new bladders for seven patients with spina bifida, a condition in which the spinal column fails to completely close during fetal development. While healthy bladders maintain a reasonably low pressure as they [...]

When the spinal cord is injured, commands and sensations can’t travel between the limbs and the brain, so arms and legs are can’t respond to the will to move. Until recently, physicians have not been able to offer spinal cord injury patients much hope for regaining function. But if the brain’s intention could [...]