Bradford Contracting and Management - Health Care Portfolio
Regenerative Medicine Vision Floor
Envisioning the Future of Regenerative Medicine at The Ottawa Hospital
Imagine that you just had a heart attack. You are rushed to The Ottawa Hospital, where doctors and nurses work quickly to save your life, and try to limit the damage.
But despite receiving the best modern care, you are left with a significantly weakened heart. However, three days later, you are being prepped for a new procedure that
will stimulate the cells in your own body to heal the damaged portion of your heart—essentially bringing your body back in time to before your heart attack.
This scenario is not science fiction—it is regenerative medicine. And this new heart therapy, one of the many applications of regenerative medicine, will soon be tested
on patients at The Ottawa Hospital.
Under the leadership of Dr. Duncan Stewart, the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute is making tremendous progress in regenerative medicine. This will have untold benefits
for people in our community who suffer from diseases such as cancer, diabetes and other ailments.
What is regenerative medicine?
The body has a limited capacity to heal itself. And there have been very few breakthroughs in traditional drugs in the past decade. The most promising advances could come
from regenerative medicine.
This new field applies the tremendous advances that have been made in our understanding of genes, stem cells and biomaterials in order to develop new ways to stimulate
growth and renewal—essentially allowing the body to heal itself. Scientists are studying many promising applications:
- Using stem cells to help regulate the immune system and reduce inflammation to allow better healing or to prevent the body from attacking itself (as happens with "autoimmune" diseases such as MS).
- Injecting the patient’s own stem cells (or cells from a compatible donor) to re-grow or repair damaged organs.
- Building artificial tissues with cells and biomaterials, such as a tube that mimics a spinal cord, providing a scaffold that can direct stem cells to grow into healthy tissue.
The urgent need for new facilities
The Sprott Centre for Stem Cell Research has allowed our scientists to unlock many mysteries surrounding stem cells and how they function, including new insights into ways to stimulate
cardiac stem cells to repair the heart. But to successfully turn these advances into new therapies, the OHRI needs more lab space and equipment to fully launch the next phase of this
exciting research. A new regenerative medicine floor will be created by developing and equipping an existing floor above the Sprott Centre at the General Campus – and we need your help to do it.
Larger facilities will allow the OHRI to hire up to six more research teams to expand its innovative programs. More state-of-the-art equipment will ensure that this lifesaving research can
grow in scope and potential. Together, these improvements will help the OHRI turn lab discoveries into therapies that physicians can apply in a practical way at the patient’s bedside.
Regenerative Medicine... Seeing is Believing
If "the eyes are the windows to the soul," vision research is truly the doorway to the future of regenerative medicine. The floor above the Sprott Centre currently houses vision researchers who
are studying stem cells in an effort to treat and prevent age-related blindness.
Once the research floor is fully developed and equipped, additional scientists will be able to work in tandem with vision researchers to apply the advances already underway, to other areas of
the human body, including the brain, the spine and the heart.
Eyes: Dr. May Griffith and her team have developed the world’s first bio-engineered cornea. They have created a "living" artificial cornea that is placed in the eye and, when injected with stem
cells, becomes a new cornea—grown right inside the body. Scientists have already tested this cornea on 10 patients in the first-ever clinical trial, with promising results.
Heart and lung: Dr. Duncan Stewart is working on a new stem cell strategy to repair damaged heart tissue (after a heart attack). The first-ever human clinical trials using this new therapy on
cardiac patients will begin in Ottawa in the next year. Clinical trials are also underway with innovative cell-based approaches to repairing blood vessels in the lungs that are damaged by pulmonary
hypertension and studies are planned in the near future for acute lung injury. Dr. Lynn Megeney has discovered a way to stimulate the growth of newly identified heart stem cells, which may offer a
simple method to "bulk up" a failing heart. Ottawa is leading the world in this innovative clinical research in stem cell therapies.
Spine: Dr. Eve Tsai is a neurosurgeon recently recruited to lead a team in spinal cord repair. She is developing tube-shaped bio-structures that could be seeded with stem cells and inserted into a
damaged spinal cord to stimulate growth and regeneration in the area of the injury. The ultimate goal is to patch a broken spinal cord, helping paralyzed patients walk again.
|
