Its never been a more exciting time for medical breakthroughs, from understanding mysterious conditions like post-COVID-19 to using everything from stem cell therapies to smartphones to advance health and well-being. Many of these innovations are happening right here in the Pacific Northwest by UW Medicine researchers.

We rounded up five of the most mouth-dropping medical developments that happened at UW Medicine in 2023.

Last December, Adriana Rodriguez, a 31-year-old from Bellingham, experienced a spontaneous tear in one of her coronary arteries two weeks after giving birth. While such tears can sometimes heal on their own, Rodriguezs heart was so damaged that it began to fail. She needed a transplant, but because of her recent pregnancy, her blood antibody levels were high, making it almost certain that her immune system would attack and reject a donor heart.

Dr. Shin Lin, a heart failure specialist, and Dr. Jay Pal, the heart transplant surgical director, made an unprecedented recommendation that she undergo a dual heart-liver transplantbased on a few reports of immunological protection in patients who had been transplanted with a liver and then a heart to replace two failing organs. Because the patients own liver was normal, the plan was to domino it into another patient who had end-stage liver disease.

On January 14, during a 17-hour procedure at UW Medical Center Montlake, Dr. Mark Sturdevant and Dr. Ramasamy Bakthavatsalam removed Rodriguezs healthy liver, transplanted her with the donor organ, and transplanted her liver into another patient who needed one. Next, Pal and Dr. John Dimarakis transplanted the donor heart. After 65 days, her antibody response to her new heart disappeared, ending the immediate threat of organ rejection.

We don't fully understand the science of transplant immunology, says Dr. Daniel Fishbein, a colleague at the Heart Institute. We need to understand the magic so we can hopefully, someday, repeat it with medications instead of an organ.

Researchers at the UW School of Medicine and UW School of Dentistry used stem cells to generate the proteins that create dental enamel, the stuff that protects teeth from getting damaged and prevents decay. They hope their findings could lead to a first-ever process to make new enamel for damaged teeth.

The body has no way to repair enamel: Specialized cells make the super hard tissue while teeth are growing, but those cells then die off when the teeth are fully formed. So a stem cell therapy to restore enamel while filling cavities, for example, would be a game-changer for repairing damaged teeth.

Hannele Ruohola-Baker, a professor of biochemistry and associate director of the UW Medicine Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, leads the lab that carried out this research in the Department of Biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine. She believes that one day, the findings could lead to living fillings, or fillings with stem cells that could reconstruct a broken or damaged tooth, or even a therapy that could grow a tooth back entirely.

It may take a while before we can regenerate them, but we can now see the steps we need to get there, Ruohola-Baker says.

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5 Medical Innovations from 2023 - Right as Rain by UW Medicine