As we have already been reporting in this blog, this spring we have completed our preclinical phase ex vivo with colons from patients. In the 21 patients we have analyzed, we have seen a great heterogeneity of cases, from the simple colon with a polyp to the rarer case of a colon restructured with a metal mesh.
In one of these “rare” cases that we could not take into account for the statistics, there is one of the patients suffering from familial adenomatous polyposis. This serious disease, more frequent than it seems, is a tissue anomaly in which thousands and thousands of polyps are generated throughout the colon. In the photo we have put a photo of a piece of our patient’s colon where you can see those “pearls” that are polyps. In the image you cannot see the scale, but this is a few square centimetres, so imagine the number of polyps that this patient had throughout the almost two meters of the colon.
Unfortunately, these patients must have their entire colon resected at a very young age, since, if this is not done, survival beyond 25 years is almost 0%. Fortunately, modern medicine is advanced enough to allow these people to have an almost normal life despite suffering from this serious disease.
