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

Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.

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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?

British Team Finds Two Genes For Osteoporosis

British researchers have identified two common genetic mutations that increase the risk of osteoporosis and related bone fractures, according to a study released on Tuesday. These changes were present in 20 percent of the people studied and highlight the potential role of screening for the bone-thinning.

Talking about Osteoporosis, other related bone diseases affecting bone formation and repair. There has been increased interest both in academia and industry in tissue regeneration and working towards understanding the biological processes involved in self regeneration.

The key to success is in understanding basic developmental processes focused on tissue regeneration (including bone formation and repair). One such key resource researchers might be interested in, is Receptome – a knowledgebase of functional endogenous ligand-receptor pairs in developmental processes.

Few key applications areas are : to identify major mediators, roles in cellular processes, expression and role of specific cell surface receptors, multi-receptor pharmacology, identify high affinity ligands and activators, natural modulators of functional ligand-receptor pairs, critical signaling nodes, transcription factors, target genes, etc.

Tissue-specific blood stem cell line established from embryonic stem cells

A research team at the Umeå Center for Molecular Medicine (UCMM) in Sweden, led by Professor Leif Carlsson, has managed to specifically establish and isolate the tissue-specific stem cell that produces blood cells (blood stem cell) by using genetically modified embryonic stem cells.

to know more

Beating heart tissue grown in lab

Talking about novel receptor genes expressed in human tissues. This morning's news featured, An international team of cell biologists has created heart tissue — complete with beat — in a test tube. The tissue culture contains three distinct cell types, each of which is important in functioning hearts, and is thus a step towards the advent of lab-grown heart-tissue transplants.

To day, research is considerably accelerated by the use of scientific knowledgebase and informatics tools which aid researchers significantly minimize time and effort spent on knowledge transfer across their teams and in scientific study. Thanks to such tools which supplement lab work and act as comprehensive repertoire that make optimal use of the plethora of data available in literature and centralize it as a searchable tool to investigate the characteristics of functional ligand-receptor pairs and their potential use and applications.

The research team led by Gordon Keller of the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Toronto, Canada, created the heart cells from human embryonic stem cells. Researchers found that treating the embryonic stem cells with growth factors encourage them to develop into cardiovascular progenitor cells which have the potential to become any of three specialized types of heart cell — two muscle cell types (cardiomyocytes and vascular smooth muscle) and endothelial cells.

When these progenitor cells were grown in a dish, they developed their own intrinsic 'heartbeat'. What's more, when researchers transplanted a mixture of the three cell types into the hearts of mice with simulated heart disease, their heart function improved significantly. Although not yet tested in humans, the technique could offer a useful way to patch up heart muscle damaged by a heart attack.