Girard grad making medical waves through unprecedented stem cell work

GIRARD

You may not think about your stomach too much unless it reminds you it’s there, maybe, by rumbling when you’re hungry.

But for Kyle McCracken, a 2004 graduate of Girard High School who’s now a third-year student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, it was a hunger for information that led him and a team of fellow researchers to focus on the stomach this past summer.

In a laboratory at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, McCracken was on his way to earning a doctorate in molecular and developmental biology. He and his team would craft a recipe for something special that no one had ever made before.

They would make it from scratch, using a very basic ingredient.

They grew whole, pea-sized stomachs in petri dishes from embryonic stem cells.

No one had ever successfully turned stem cells into stomach cells before, McCracken said recently in a phone interview.

McCracken’s team guided their stem cells into stomach tissue by adding different chemicals and “signals,” he said.

“We try to recapitulate what would happen in the embryo in the dish,” he said. “After four or five weeks, it turns into a stomach.”

Those stomachs, McCracken said, will be important going forward in helping to understand how the organ works and how to fight diseases.

“We started to study how this one bacteria that is responsible for major cancers and ulcers causes changes in the stomach,” he said.

McCracken also said drug companies might use them to study how different drugs affect the stomach.

He said that in the more distant future, there is a potential use for transplants.

Read more about this life-changing work by the Mahoning Valley native in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.