Excellent News

A paralyzed man is able to walk again, thanks to cells taken from an adult's nose.

It may even be possible for this to be replicated, "if funding can be raised." A comment on the story says:
"Raisman, who hopes to see at least three more patients treated in Poland over the next three to five years if the funding can be raised, said"

Wait - what? "if the funding can be raised"? If this report is accurate, there should be no question of funding. The procedure surely should be repeated in a careful study of 30 to 50 people, with funding from the NHS.

The cost is trivial - if we have (as we do) fixed budgets, then cut back on varicose vein surgery and gender-reassignment surgery to cover the costs of this research, No brainer.
You would think.

4 comments:

douglas said...

Just think of the cost savings of not having people on disability and needing high levels of constant care- this more than pays for itself at the societal level.

No brainer is right.

Texan99 said...

It will hardly need help from any government. If the approach is promising, money will pour in from the private sector. The willing market for this kind of treatment is incalculable.

Anonymous said...

Actually, well-intentioned government intervention has caused investment money for early-stage technologies to dry up. There are people who do not want there to be ANY profit in medical inventions, and their policies are imbedded in our funding of NIH.

So, the researchers tend to live off grants, and there are inevitably more applications than money.

Then there are the various equivalents of the FDA, which exist for the sole purpose of slowing the implementation of new, medical technologies. The US dodged a bullet with Thalidomide through bureaucratic negligence, and both the US FDA and the other FDA equivalents have been very happy to run with this precedent.

Poland is a good place for this research. It will have appeal to the local government, which will be interested in the prospect of establishing a medical company.

Valerie

Ymar Sakar said...

Livestock don't need no stinkin regeneration therapy.

When farm animals get crippled, they are economically efficient to replace.