Towards a "holy grail" in human medicine: the ability to restore organs damaged through trauma, disease, cancer, or even the normal aging process.

Tissue or organ repair has been the ultimate goal of surgery from ancient times to the present day. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in the regeneration of tissues, and tissue repair in organisms is within reach. However, we are a long way from understanding how to coax the human body into regenerating complex body parts after injury or disease. As an example, regeneration of amputated limbs in amphibians - “epimorphic” regeneration which includes cellular dedifferentiation in the injured tissues of the limb stump and proliferation of these cells to form a distal blastema which undergoes patterning and growth to restore the missing limb structures.

Some of the processes that are relatively little known and most of scientists are keen in understanding are:

1. Processes involving cell recruitment of progenitor cells to the site of disease or injury and tissue-specific differentiation
2. Growth factors and cytokines responsible for activating the body's own native cells to initiate regeneration.
3. Integration of the regenerated tissue within the surrounding host tissue and true differentiation through pathways involved in embryonic development
4. Regulation of expression of a target gene can induce the expression of one or more tissue-inductive factors
5. Direct the differentiation of stem or progenitor cells, or remove a factor that inhibits regeneration
6. Ability of differentiating cells of muscle and other tissues to lose their ability to revert to the proliferative state and contribute to organ regeneration

Molecular Connections Private Ltd. Bangalore India has announced the launch of its new Knowledgebase of all activating and inhibitory cell surface receptors and their complexes with the ligand(s) determined to date - Receptome:

1. Knowledgebase, is a result of manually mining thousands of papers, on functional ligand-receptor pairs with their role & biological significance in developmental biology, as reported in literature till date
2. Careful description of cell surface receptors, ligand(s) and molecular pathways integrated into complex networks and their expression patterns (signatures) involved in tissue regeneration
3. Completely deciphered pathways of endogenous growth factors and cytokines and their receptors with their regulatory mechanisms involved in tissue regeneration.
4. Endogenous modulators or regulators of developmental ligand-receptor(s) widely studied in differentiation of stem or progenitor cells or tissue regeneration
5. A platform to identify and track stem cells in different culture programs using expression profiles of markers
6. Comprehensive overview of the synergistic and combinatorial effects of receptors in tissue

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Fresh hurdle for stem cell hunt

Previously blogging on the topic of regenerative medicine in Regenerative Medicine Start-Up Created out of ORNL. A Nobel Prize-winning scientist says it could be tougher than first thought to harness the healing power of stem cells in medicine.

It had been hoped a single "master" cell could potentially be used to repair all damage in a single organ. Stem cells may be more varied than previously thought. Professor Mario Capecchi, from the University of Utah, found surprising clues that different stem cells might be working together in the same organ. This means experimental treatments relying on the wrong type might fail.

Professor Capecchi, writing in the Nature Genetics, said the finding suggested stem cell biology could be "more complicated" than previously thought, which could be bad news for patients hoping for the swift arrival of new therapies.

Bmi1 plays an essential part in the self-renewal of hematopoietic and neural stem cells. To investigate its role in other adult stem cell populations, we generated a mouse expressing a tamoxifen-inducible Cre from the Bmi1 locus. We found that Bmi1 is expressed in discrete cells located near the bottom of crypts in the small intestine, predominantly four cells above the base of the crypt (+4 position). Over time, these cells proliferate, expand, self-renew and give rise to all the differentiated cell lineages of the small intestine epithelium. The induction of a stable form of -catenin in these cells was sufficient to rapidly generate adenomas. Moreover, ablation of Bmi1⁺ cells using a Rosa26 conditional allele, expressing diphtheria toxin, led to crypt loss. These experiments identify Bmi1 as an intestinal stem cell marker in vivo. Unexpectedly, the distribution of Bmi1-expressing stem cells along the length of the small intestine suggested that mammals use more than one molecularly distinguishable adult stem cell subpopulation to maintain organ homeostasis.

Do you want to know more? Nature Genetics Published online: 8 June 2008

Regenerative Medicine Start-Up Created out of ORNL

Battelle Ventures has spun out a firm from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with an initial $1.5 million seed investment. The company, called NellOne Therapeutics, will develop regenerative medicines. The funding will be tranched based on key technical milestones.

Towards a "holy grail" in human medicine: the ability to restore organs damaged through trauma, disease, cancer, or even the normal aging process.

Tissue or organ repair has been the ultimate goal of surgery from ancient times to the present day. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in the regeneration of tissues, and tissue repair in organisms is within reach. However, we are a long way from understanding how to coax the human body into regenerating complex body parts after injury or disease. As an example, regeneration of amputated limbs in amphibians - “epimorphic” regeneration which includes cellular dedifferentiation in the injured tissues of the limb stump and proliferation of these cells to form a distal blastema which undergoes patterning and growth to restore the missing limb structures. Some of the processes that are relatively little known and most of scientists are keen in understanding are:

• Processes involving cell recruitment of progenitor cells to the site of disease or injury and tissue-specific differentiation
• Growth factors and cytokines responsible for activating the body's own native cells to initiate regeneration
• Integration of the regenerated tissue within the surrounding host tissue and true differentiation through pathways involved in embryonic development
• Regulation of expression of a target gene can induce the expression of one or more tissue-inductive factors
• Direct the differentiation of stem or progenitor cells, or remove a factor that inhibits regeneration
• Ability of differentiating cells of muscle and other tissues to lose their ability to revert to the proliferative state and contribute to organ regeneration

Molecular Connections Private Ltd. Bangalore India has come up with its new Knowledgebase of all activating and inhibitory cell surface receptors and their complexes with the ligand(s) determined to date - Receptome:

• Knowledgebase, is a result of manually mining thousands of papers, on functional ligand-receptor pairs with their role & biological significance in developmental biology, as reported in literature till date
• Careful description of cell surface receptors, ligand(s) and molecular pathways integrated into complex networks and their expression patterns (signatures) involved in tissue regeneration
• Completely deciphered pathways of endogenous growth factors and cytokines and their receptors with their regulatory mechanisms involved in tissue regeneration
• Endogenous modulators or regulators of developmental ligand-receptor(s) widely studied in differentiation of stem or progenitor cells or tissue regeneration
• A platform to identify and track stem cells in different culture programmes using expression profiles of markers
• Comprehensive overview of the synergistic and combinatorial effects of receptors in tissue regeneration

X-men The man who grew a finger!

SiFi's alway feature and fantasize sprays and powders that can instantaneously close wounds catalyzing then and there the process of tissue regeneration. Every time you watch
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine regenerate and heals his wounds, wonder how?

How? Well that's the truly remarkable part. It wasn't a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder - or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story.

Mr Speivak's brother Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him the powder.

For ten days Mr Spievak put a little on his finger.

"The second time I put it on I already could see growth. Each day it was up further. Finally it closed up and was a finger.

"It took about four weeks before it was sealed."

Now he says he has "complete feeling, complete movement."

The "pixie dust" comes from the University of Pittsburgh, though in the lab Dr Stephen Badylak prefers to call it extra cellular matrix.

"I think that within ten years that we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones, and promote the growth of functional tissue around those bones" Says Dr Stephen Badylak University of Pittsburgh

Do you want to know more?