…’If I hug you, don’t be afraid’

1 over 80. That is the actual proportion of autistic babies, according to what Franco Antonello said tonight while being interviewed on Tv at ‘Le invasioni barbariche‘.

Andrea, his autistic son, was there in the studios with him, playing with his I-Pad, moving his hands like a crazy butterfly and stealing the anchorwoman’s papers. Franco took his a curly long-haired teenager with him for the interview because he strongly wanted it. Though getting scared for a while when he entered the studios, Andrea stayed quite calm during the whole chat. He got excited just when he saw the mountains on the screen which showed some of the pictures these father and son took while travelling together.

This travelling together gave birth to a wonderful book, ‘If I hug you, don’t be afraid’, written by Fulvio Ervas and already translated and distributed in many countries (Franco confessed he was almost thrilled when he saw the Chinese cover). I don’t know what you think about it, but I feel cuddled everytime I repeat to myself this very title. It sounds like a sweet embrace itself, the sweetest sentence a parent could use for his scared son to calm and feel reassured. Franco took Andrea to a 3-months travel to America. After years spent in hospitals, treatments, therapies, Franco decided to leave for a different type of adventure, just the two of them, to explore some bits of this wonderful world and spend together the thrilling sensations of discoveries. Unpredictable, like Andrea.

1 over 80 autistic babies. 400.000 just in Italy. After the book, after the interviews that spread the story of his travel with his son, Franco started receiving hundreds of e-mails from parents and siblings of autistic guys. Full of questions and the urgent need of suggestions. “I don’t feel like giving scientific and medical advice, I don’t have recipes. I work in communication and I feel things, I don’t have proper solutions for myself. I feel, instinctively” he said during the interview. But he felt like giving some practical advice.

During his travels all around Italy and the world, he happened to see a lot of desperate situations, without either institutional and social support. “Families can’t cope with autism on their own, mothers and fathers don’t have to feel they are alone”. Franco and Andrea might have more many economical and cultural possibilities if compared with other poorer and isolated families, but “we’re doing all that also for them, for people who don’t have our ways to deal with this condition. We’re talking about situations that are similar to Andrea’s one because we want them to find a voice.

We resist, if we do exist. ”

I strongly recommend this book. It helped me to perceive the power of an authentic story.

NEW STEP IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH WITH 3D STEM CELLS

I find it particularly moving when I read that a research was done in a place where I actually lived for quite a while. That’s what happened when I read a Scottish study that was led thanks to the collaboration of the Heriot-Watt University and the Roslin Cellab. If you remember the story of Dolly the Sheep, she was actually created in the Roslin Institute, just outside Edinburgh. That city stole my heart. Especially due to its green surroundings, which include Roslin, also well-known for its chapel, which comes up in the Da Vinci Code.

To get to the point of the study itself, some Scottish researchers have discovered a new 3D printing technique to produce embryonic stem cells (hESCs) that stay alive and maintain their capacity to differentiate into different types of cells.These 3D structures from hESCs will lead to the creation of accurate human tissue models that are fundamental for in vitro drug development and toxicity-testing. Furthermore, in the longer term they might be used to create viable 3D organs for medical implantation. The research has been published on 4^th February 2013 in the journal Biofabrication.

Dr. Shu, co-author of the study, said: “This is the first time that hESCs have been printed”. While most of the laboratory grown cells grew in 2D, there have been previous researches that printed certain cell types in 3D. In any case, due to their high sensitivity, it hasn’t been possible to manipulate human stem cell cultures in this way before. These researchers used a valve-based printing technique that  managed to preserve the delicate properties of hESCs, which were driven by pneumatic pressure and accurately controlled by the opening and closing of a microvalve. Shu explained: “The valve‐based printing is gentle enough to maintain high stem cell viability, accurate enough to produce spheroids of uniform size, and, most importantly, the printed hESCsmaintained their ability to be differentiated into any other cell type.”

This is a real breakthrough because so far animal cells have been used in the majority of the studies to test the different printing methods for the fabrication of 3D tissues and organs. But most of drug discoveries target human diseases, so it is more reasonable to use human tissues for the experiments, which would make the process of drug testing both faster and more effective. In the longer term the development of this technique might also lead to the creation of organs for transplant. Donations would be unnecessary and the problems of immune suppression and transplant rejection would be avoided because 3D organs would be created from a patient’s own cells.

Biomaterials and regenerative medicine are rapidly developing studies: in the future, they might succeed where medicine has not found solutions yet. The Chinese have already recognized their potential value and are largely investing in tissue engineering and biomaterials:this new Scottish achievement leads scientific research in these fields one step further.

Credits image: Flickr, Bikerock