Salamanders can regrow a lost limb. Humans grow a scar and call it a day. The difference, biologists have assumed since roughly Aristotle, is that we simply lack the machinery.
However, some researchers suspected that the machinery is there, just switched off, and they appear to have found the switch.
After amputating mouse digits and letting them heal (mean, we know), they applied 2 chemical signals. The first pursuaded the scar-making cells out of their usual job and into building a blastema (the cellular construction site that salamanders use to regrow limbs), and the second told that construction site what to put up. Out came bone, joint, tendon and ligament. Not a flawless replica, but unmistakably the right parts in roughly the right places.
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🧐 What's in it for me? Regrowing a finger on demand remains a way off, and the mouse results were partial (sorry mouse), but in the short term, nudging wounds away from scarring and towards rebuilding via the same process is extremely tangible. Better healing first, spare parts later.
💵 Out of the Lab: If scarring is a choice the body makes rather than a limit it's stuck with, the regenerative medicine pitch shifts from importing cells to reprogramming the ones already present, which is cheaper, simpler and a great deal more scalable.
Morphoceuticals, co-founded by Tufts professors Michael Levin and David Kaplan, is chasing the same prize from a different angle, using bioelectric signals to tell cells to rebuild limbs. It regrew a functional frog leg from a single 24-hour treatment.
Medtronic already sells BMP2 commercially as its Infuse bone graft, so it understands the building signal better than most.
Organogenesis itself an MIT spinout built on fibroblast-derived tissue products, is exactly the sort of wound-care incumbent a scar-to-regeneration shift would reshape.
Until next time.
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