Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Doris A. Taylor Director Texas Heart Institute.
Ira Pastor comments:
For the last few months we’ve been profiling many cutting edge bio-molecular technologies in the pipeline and moving us into a 21st century curative model. These breakthroughs promise to have a major impact on many of the chronic degenerative diseases responsible for human suffering and death and push us into an era of extended health-spans, lifespans, and rejuvenation.
Urgent need for human organs
Every year, 65 million people leave this world. Whether those deaths are related to diseases of aging (100,000 per day) or acute traumas (65,000 per day), it all eventually trickles down to the death of our complex, critical, 3D organ systems that give us our daily structure and function and support us on our average 75 year existence.
Is the solution to build them?
Imagine for a moment that typical scenario playing out in ICUs all over the world on a daily basis, where your doctor says: “Your kidneys are failing, dialysis is not working anymore, your liver is no longer functioning, your heart is dying, and there is nothing else we can do. In short: you need to prepare for the end!”.
Need to create more organs
This is followed by that frantic question – “Well Dr., what about potential transplant opportunities?” The United Network for Organ Sharing data, the private, non-profit organization that manages the nation’s organ transplant system under contract with the federal government, would tell them as of today (4/11) from a U.S. perspective alone, in the kidney queue there are 94,913 before you, in the liver queue there are 13,296 before you, in the heart queue there are 3,795 before you.
A rather pathetic situation! And those numbers don’t include the millions of pre-organ failures lining up that will die before ever being considered to get into the queue. Now let’s take a trip into the future where the scenario goes something like this. “Your kidneys are failing. Your liver is not functioning. Your heart is dying.” And the response is: “We’ll get a replacement for you in 45 minutes! Go and have something to eat. Get some rest. Come back in a few hours. You’ll be as good as new after a straightforward replacement procedure!”.
Build organs to satisfy the urgent need?
Today’s guest, Dr. Taylor is Director, Regenerative Medicine Research, and Director, Center for Cell and Organ Biotechnology at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Texas, where she works on this truly bleeding edge integration of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Dr. Taylor has a PhD in Pharmacology from UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas.
She did her post-doctoral studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, where she first worked with tissue engineering, growing heart muscle cells in the laboratory. She was on the faculty of Duke University from 1991 to 2007, and then moved to University of Minnesota, where in 2008 her team published a truly landmark paper in Nature Medicine where they created new beating rat hearts, using a combination of tissue engineering processes. She joined the Texas Heart Institute in 2012, where she continues on this path to translate these technologies for human use one day in the near future.
Today Dr. Taylor talks about:
Her background and journey; how she got interested in science and pharmacology, and how she arrived at this amazing epi-center of organ bioengineering.
She’ll be discussing the focus of her research, her views on translational organ replacement possibilities in the coming decades and her views on possibilities to bring aging under biomedical control. Towards the end of the interview, Dr. Taylor tells me who she would like to meet and what she would like to discuss with this person. Be sure to watch to the end!
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Credits: Ira Pastor interview video, text, and audio.
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