by HENRY FOUNTAIN
Mark Barfknecht has had dead intestine removed; his doctor is in the early stages of finding a way to grow replacement tissue. PHOTO/Monica Almeida/The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — 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. Mark’s case was so severe that most of his intestines had been removed.
Now Dr. Grikscheit, a surgeon, was trying to determine how much of the rest she could save.
Dr. Grikscheit is renowned for her skill in treating infants like Mark, whose only way to survive may be as what she calls a “short gut kid” — left with too little intestine to absorb food normally and forced to get nutrition through a needle into the bloodstream.
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.
The New York Times for more