This grant is being submitted to support a symposium which will stimulate interactions between academic and corporate researchers who are contributing to the emergence of a new form of biomedical therapy. This therapy lends itself to treating chronic degenerative disease states where current alternate therapies are either costly, poorly effective, or nonexistent. At a time when health costs are a national concern, and when research dollars are increasingly difficult to find, a meeting of this type will help a body of researchers who can contribute to decreased health care costs identify critical path studies which will make the best use of their research dollar. Working across disciplines, bioengineering and cell biology have been creating a new therapeutic modality which exploits transplanted and; increasingly, immunoisolated cells as biological delivery systems, and which combines insight and challenges in the fields of transplantation, membrane, science, cell biology, and genetic engineering. Initially conceived in the mid-seventies as a """"""""bioartificial pancreas"""""""" for the treatment of type-I diabetes, immunoisolation is now playing a much broader role in the development of therapies for CNS disorders, chronic degenerative diseases, and hemophilia. Immunoisolation also represents a potentially advantageous method for the delivery of recombinant cell products. In the past two years, investigative focus has shifted from small animal models to preclinical and clinical trials. Topics to be addressed during this conference include results in unencapsulated fetal and allograft cell transplantation in the treatment of diabetes and central nervous system disorders, techniques for cell encapsulation, engineering of implants containing living cells, pre-clinical and early clinical results of encapsulated cell therapy in diabetes, pain, neurodegenerative diseases and several newly emerging applications. Presentations on the underlying interdisciplinary fields of membrane technology, cell biology, and allo and xeno-graft immunology will also be featured. The research community currently lacks a single forum where all the critical path technologies involved in cell transplant therapy are jointly considered. Meetings of the type proposed in this application are critically important to stimulate interactions within this interdisciplinary science and to sustain the growth of the field of cellular transplant therapeutics. The health care benefits which can accrue from the success of this scientific field will be felt both socially and economically throughout the nation.
