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Prepared Witness Testimony The House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Assessing Initiatives to Increase Organ Donations
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Dr. Joseph Vacanti MD
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in the hearing "Assessing Initiatives to Increase Organ Donations". I am a surgeon who practices pediatric surgery as well as pediatric transplantation surgery. I have been in the practice of these two special areas of surgery in children since completing my training in 1983. My remarks today are in regard to the ever increasing problem of vital organ shortages and the work that I have done in trying to solve this problem. As you all are aware, organ transplantation has been enormously successful and is one of the major advances of twentieth century medicine and surgery. However, its very success has led to the ever-worsening problem of organ donor shortage. We now have all of the tools at our disposal of being very successful in transplantation of vital organs. However, the fundamental thing we need is the vital organ for transplantation. Currently, there are over 80,000 Americans waiting for a vital organ to become available. The field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine has been developed to try and meet this need. Over the last 18 years my laboratory with many of my collaborators have been developing technologies in biology, medicine, and engineering to actually make living tissues and organs for replacement therapy. This challenging and novel approach has advanced from fiction to reality. The work has now advanced into human therapy in several circumstances but not yet for vital organs. As an example, several commercially available skin products have been developed and commercialized. In fact, the tragic of September 11th produced many patients with horrible burn wounds. Tissue engineered skin was donated to help these patients both survive and then have an improved quality of life. Besides skin, products of living cartilage, living bone, living blood vessels, and some early investigation into living human bladder are now available. The fundamental scientific and technologic basis of this approach has been developed over these past 18 years. There have been many new advances in the understanding of living cells and advances in material science to produce better and better living tissues. Given all this, the ultimate challenge is the creation of a life-saving whole organ to solve the organ shortage. We continue to work on this most difficult problem at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and the Draper Laboratories. Based on the work that we have performed over the past five years, it is my feeling that this problem is solvable and that the goal is achievable. It will require the firm commitment of intellectual resources for creative problem solving and financial resources to actually achieve the seemingly impossible. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first powered human flight. All previous human civilizations had dreamed of human flight. However, it was American know-how and American determination that ultimately achieved this seemingly impossible goal 100 years ago. This new problem of biologic engineering can also be solved. Thank you for the privilege of discussing this at this hearing.
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