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Regenerating Life and Limb in a Test Tube
By Ellen Brennan, Pennsylvania
When I decided to apply to graduate school to work towards a doctorate in bioengineering, I never expected that I would end up doing research in cutting edge medical science.
I had thought for some time that tissue engineering sounded like a really cool field - the idea that living skin, organs, limbs and cells could actually be grown or regenerated in a laboratory suggested that one day, if perfected, degenerative diseases and type I diabetes might be cured and kidney dialysis, organ donation, and amputation might be ancient history.
"Developing living organs and tissues or restoring function to damaged tissues and organs may sound like science fiction to some, but great progress has already been made in the less than 20 years since the field has been established." -Ellen Brennan
Developing living organs and tissues or restoring function to damaged tissues and organs may sound like science fiction to some, but great progress has already been made in the less than 20 years since the field has been established.
Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies have the potential to help people all over the world with many different ailments. People die every day waiting for organ transplants. Soldiers return to the US from service in Afghanistan and Iraq with missing digits and limbs, and people all over the world suffer from degenerative diseases and spinal cord injuries. All of these conditions may one day be treated with tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies.
Scientists, engineers, and physicians work together in this interdisciplinary field to research and develop therapies to treat these conditions. Some of the most exciting recent breakthroughs have hit major milestones toward creating entire organs in the laboratory that can be used to treat patients.
Researchers at Wake Forest University, led by Dr. Anthony Atala, have reconstructed patients' bladders using their own cells that were expanded and grown on a scaffold to form the appropriate domed shape.
Researchers at University of Minnesota, led by Dr. Doris Taylor, have created functional heart tissue in the laboratory by removing all cells from animal cadaver hearts, leaving only three-dimensional scaffolds composed of extracellular matrix (the fibrous network that supports cells), and filling those scaffolds with progenitor cells that grew and formed beating cardiac tissue.
Early stages of research to develop methods for digit and limb regeneration have been led by teams at University of Pittsburgh and University of California, Irvine. Indeed, all over the world, research teams are making discoveries that may have the potential to help patients suffering from many different conditions.
I am currently performing my doctoral research in a lab, working with Dr. Stephen Badylak at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. I work with a team of about 20 scientists, engineers, and physicians. The focus of our laboratory work is the investigation of scaffolds composed of extracellular matrix for applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
The area of my research (which I have been working on for the past four years) could lead to both improved scaffolds for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine as well as new therapies that could recruit a patient's own stem cells to repair injured tissue, resulting in a regenerative response rather than the default adult mammalian wound healing mechanism of scar tissue formation.
The possibilities for new regenerative therapies made available to patients in the coming years are enormous. I am still amazed that a presentation given by a scientist from a company called Organogenesis at my university that introduced me to the first cell-based tissue-engineered product approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, defined the direction of my graduate research and my future career.
