My head is pounding. This will be short and disjointed because there are two topics I want to bring up and my head hurts too much to write very long.

First, I have reviewed the paperwork for the Dana-Farber fund and have signed off on it and sent it back up to them. The official name of the fund is The Walking with Jane Dybowski Fund for Neuroendocrine Cancer. I am not quite sure how to make contributions to the fund, but they have told me all money donated to Dana-Farber in Jane’s memory will go into that fund. As further details become available I will post them here. I am sure that if you send them a check made out to the fund or to D-F with a note that it is for the fund it will get there–for those of you making year-end donations to the charities you support.

This next may seem a bit off the NET path. I was watching the PBS NewsHour tonight and they did an extended segment on extra-cellular matrix–ECM. This stuff provides the scaffolding on which new tissue can be built–apparently of virtually any kind. I first encountered this stuff about two years ago on 60 Minutes. They were talking to a doctor in Pittsburg about it because he was using it to grow a new trachea for someone who had his removed due to cancer.

The thing on PBS tonight showed just how far things have progressed with this since I saw that program two years back. Part of the piece was a profile of a Marine who had lost a good chunk of his thigh in an explosion in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Using ECM he had grown back a large part of his thigh–and while it was not pretty to look at, he did a 10-mile mountain bike trip with the correspondent at a substantial pace.

They talked with researchers at several schools and labs. One woman at Yale has grown working rat lungs that work fine until they are transplanted into the rat. They don’t work for long afterwards. But simpler tissue–the trachea, muscle, veins and arteries–all functions fine–even in humans.

What does all this have to do with NET? Nothing just yet. But they have already grown livers using the stuff–and while there are no human trials that far up the chain yet–that day will come. Imagine someone with NET that has spread to the liver–we just grow them a new one from their own cells–no chance of rejection–and do the transplant. Pancreatic NET–or even straight pancreatic cancer–grow a new pancreas.

Of course those things are years in the future–if we ever get there at all. And early detection will remain the best chance we have even then. But the possibilities are there. When they become probabilities…