Tuesday, February 20, 2007

A pig’s bladder saved my finger

Posted by amir at 2:57 PM

Monday, February 19, 2007

Finger grower
The finger that grew back
A model plane enthusiast who lost his fingertip in an accident saw it grow back after he treated it with the extract of a pig's bladder.
Lou Spievack opted for the bizarre treatment after taking advice from his brother Alan, a businessman and former Harvard surgeon.
Mr Spievack used a powder made from a pig's bladder to treat the finger after it was sliced off by the propeller of a model plane at his hobby store in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2005.
Mr Spievack said he used the powder for four weeks and found the finger grew back to its original size.
Mr Spievack's brother had previously set up a company called ACell which produced the powder to regenerate damaged ligaments in horses.
This is the first time it has been tried on a human body part. An impressed Mr Spievack said:
'All my fingers in this weather have cracked except that one; I'm amazed.'
Now the US military is launching studies on the pig cells in the hope they can be used to treat injured soldiers.
Dr Stephen Badylak, from the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, who is involved in the US Army research, said the treatment would be tried on up to ten patients.
'This is just a shot in the dark,' Dr Badylak added. 'There is literally nothing else these individuals have to try. They have nothing to lose.
'We are not smart enough to figure out how to regrow a finger. Maybe what we can do is bring all the pieces of the puzzle to the right place and let Mother Nature take its course.'
Doctors anticipate they will know within six to ten weeks whether the trials are successful.
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