The Speculist

Regeneration

Interesting article in Wired about research in regeneration:

Keating himself believes that regeneration research is on the brink of a revolution - the very place genetics was 20 years ago. "We've been studying regeneration for 200 years, sure," he shrugs. "But we've got different tools now. For the first time, we can see what's happening at the level of molecules and genes." From Keating's perspective, growing a whole arm would be a needlessly complicated parlor trick. But if our regenerative abilities could be sped up even a little, the effect would be extraordinary. "Patients with kidney failure need just 10 percent of their cells back and they can go off dialysis," says Dean Li, Keating's colleague at Utah and now his business partner. "Likewise, when you have a heart attack, there's a big difference between losing 20 percent of your heart cells and 40 percent."

Evidence suggests that the ability to re-grow damaged tissue (rather than cover over it with scar tissue) may involve a genetic switch that was thrown off somewhere in the process of evolution. If we can find that switch and figure out how to turn it back on, we've taken a major step towards life extension.

And we may be getting close:

Until the fall of 1998, when, on something of a lark, Keating and his colleagues, postdoc Shannon Odelberg and researcher Chris McGann, decided to treat mouse muscle cells in a petri dish with a liquefied extract made from a newt's regenerating leg cap. Unlike newt cells, mammalian muscle cells change dramatically as they mature, growing fat bundles of ropelike fibers and merging their cytoplasms en masse, like eggs whose whites have run together. Believing that this elaborate structure could be reversed was, researchers thought, like expecting a Ming vase to morph back into a lump of raw clay and powdered pigments.

And yet, under the influence of the newt extract, that was exactly what happened. "Nobody expected it to work," admits Odelberg, still sounding baffled. In a follow-up experiment, the researchers were able to apply growth factors to dedifferentiated cells, making the stem cells mature again to resemble muscle, bone, or fat cells.

It was a staggering discovery. "People had been studying regeneration for years and had zero evidence it could happen in mammals," Li says. "It wasn't until Mark and Shannon debunked the myth of terminal differentiation that anyone believed this could work."

Very interesting. Read the whole thing.