Dr. Tracy Grikscheit held a length of intestine in her gloved hands, examining it inch by inch as if she were checking a bicycle tube for leaks.
The intestine was still attached, at one end, to Mark Barfknecht, a 1-year-old whose pink cheeks belied the reason he was lying on an operating table at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Born three months premature, Mark had developed a disorder that affects up to 10 percent of babies who weigh about 3 pounds or less at birth, causing some of their intestinal tissue to die.
...But devoted as she is to saving children in the operating room, Dr. Grikscheit is equally determined to find a better solution than the intravenous feeding, possibly for life, that such patients face. Much of her time is spent in her laboratory across the street, at the hospital’s Saban Research Institute, where she is working with her research team to find a way to make replacement intestines for infants like Mark, using the body itself to nourish and push the engineered tissue to grow.She envisions a day when her approach moves beyond the lab to the operating room. Future operations to remove dead intestine from a baby — or from other patients with severe intestinal damage — would include an additional step: a little bit of good intestine would be sent to a table nearby, where technicians would quickly prepare a bundle for immediate implantation in the patient’s omentum.