What Regenerative Medicine Consists Of

Sometime around Christmas Mikhail Batin, President of the Science for Life Extension Foundation, and I gave talks at the headquarters of one quite famous journal called Science and Life. This journal is sort of like a Russian version of Popular Mechanics or Scientific American. The idea of this “media club” is to enlighten the journalists about emerging technologies like personalized genomics, synthetic biology and possible life extension therapies. This meeting was about regenerative medicine. My talk was a brief overview of the field, what it consists of and when and which organs were engineered in the lab. Here’s the presentation I showed to the audience. You are most welcome to download and use it in the way you like.

Days of Molecular Medicine 2011

It seems to be an extremely interesting conference. Just to highlight a couple of talks: Engineering functional liver tissue, Nanofibers and iPS cells for neural regeneration, Exploring stem cell niche interactions at single cell resolution. Take a look at  the whole program. I believe it’s worth visiting, because regenerative medicine is one of the ways of life extension.

Stem cells used to grow functioning human intestine

Researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have recently made functional human intestinal tissue from pluripotent stem cells.  The researchers project that this will push the boundaries of research into how the intestines develop and work.  It will also help with understanding the diseases that affect this organ and aid in producing intestinal tissues for transplant.

The study’s senior investigator, James Wells, Ph.D, stated that this was the first time cells in a petri dish were programmed to efficiently mimic the cell structures of human intestinal tissue.  Regarding the future applications of this find, he said, “The hope is that our ability to turn stem cells into intestinal tissue will eventually be therapeutically beneficial for people with diseases such as necrotizing enterocolitis, inflammatory bowel disease and short bowel syndrome.”

New hope for repairing Multiple Sclerosis damage

Researchers at Cambridge and Edinburgh have discovered a way for stem cells in the brain to regenerate myelin, which is needed to protect nerve fibers. The studies, performed on rats, are exciting because they offer new hope that in the future, the damage done by multiple sclerosis could be repaired and physical function lost by patients could be restored.

The studies indicated that the patient’s own brain could be stimulated to regenerate myelin. Professor Charles ffrench-Constant, one of the lead researchers, was hopeful that the discoveries made could lead to the development of new drugs. “The discovery is very exciting as it could potentially pave the way to find drugs that could help repair damage caused to the important layers that protect nerve cells in the brain.”

Discovery on Chemicals Needed to Reprogram Cells

Scientists at Scripps Research Institute have found a way to reprogram mature human cells into their pluripotent state and safely turn them into stem cells which as we know can change into other cell types. This reprogramming would pave the way for the large-scale production of stem cells that could be used inexpensively and consistently in drug development. Cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and many other diseases might be possible if new cells could be created from a patient’s own cells to replace those that are diseased or damaged.

In his research report,  Associate Professor Sheng Ding, PhD, reports a novel cocktail of drug-like small molecules that, with the assistance of a gene called Oct4, enables reprogramming of human skin cells into stem cells.