Week 6

This week, I also shadowed Dr. John Kennedy for the surgery and clinic as well. In terms of clinics, there were not many things different from what I have seen for last couple of weeks. Most therapies were shockwave or PRP injection. However, he explained more about the mechanisms of injuries, which was really helpful for me to understand how the treatment can be determined.

Another thing I was impressed by was the Lipogems.
http://www.jockdoctors.com/services/lipogems-lipoaspiration-treatment/ 
Bianchi, Francesca, et al. "A new nonenzymatic method and device to obtain a fat tissue derivative highly enriched in pericyte-like elements by mild mechanical forces from human lipoaspirates." Cell transplantation 22.11 (2013): 2063-2077.
This procedure using the Lipogems has gained a lot of attention due to its powerful therapeutic effect. Simply, first thing to do is aspirating adipose tissues from a patient, and purifying the essential components which are mainly mesenchymal stem cells, pericytes, and other beneficial biomolecules. Since all the molecules and cells are from the patient, there's no concern immune response. What the major advantages of Lipogems are that there is no need for enzymatic process to isolate mesenchymal stem cells and it does not take much time, less than an hour from aspiration to injection.

I feel like sometime simplifying current procedures also can be a good aim for research. I have only one week left and feel time really flies.

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