This from PhysOrg.com.
"In short, we discovered we can grow normal and tumor cells from the same patient forever, and nobody has been able to do that," he says. "Normal cell cultures for most organ systems can't be established in the lab, so it wasn't possible previously to compare normal and tumor cells directly." The implication is that various cancer treatments (chemical, radiation, other) can be tried on the patient's own cancer and normal cells to determine efficacy of killing cancerous cells and not good cells BEFORE administering to patient! I think this also potentially opens the door to growing a replacement organ from a person's own cells to eliminate rejection when transplanted into the patient. -Mark
