Slate – Anthony Atala ( the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine – he also had a TED talk in 2010 where he showed off an engineered kidney)predicts, “Within the next decade, we will see partial replacements of [some] organs—not the entire replacement, but many times that’s all we need.” Of course, the very necessary regulatory process will have to be carried out before there is widespread use of regenerated organs. Atala notes that the average drug takes 15.5 years to be approved in the United States, and regenerative medicine is neither drug nor medical device, but a combination thereof, which makes approval even more complicated. However, he tells me, the FDA has recently created an Office of Combined Products that will help this process run a bit more smoothly.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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