For people that have lost any body part, either by amputation, or other means; what if I tell you it’s possible to turn your body back again, would you believe me? That’s the nature of thinking big. Think science; think big.
Evolutionarily, humans are not designed to withstand the assaults of this out present age. But an entirely new form of medicine has arisen to change this; Regenerative medicine it is. The major aim and objective of this form of medicine is to make the human body’s natural stem cell or progenitor cell to regenerate damaged tissues.
This could be the transformation the world of medicine has been waiting for. I believe this idea came from the survey of some portions of the human body that are very regenerative.
Take for instance the human intestines. It has the ability to regenerate itself completely every five days. And amazingly, this ability occurs until you’re extremely very old. That means, the body has the natural ability to regenerate some tissues.
The aim of regenerative biology is to identify the signals that cells get to initiate regeneration, and also to map out the genome responsible for cell regeneration. With this, we can turn on the dormant progenitor cells that are all over the human body.
But to make the process very effective, applications should be focused on where those cells can be activated very selectively and locally for a specific period of time. That will give you the ease in the control and reactivating the systems overtly.
I’ve mentioned stem cell, and also progenitor cell. Is there any difference? Sure there is, and I’ll explain very simply in a layman’s term. Stem cell can become any cell to the final tissue, but progenitor cells are almost locked into their fate. So when you activate the progenitor cells, they’ll only know how to make cells of one or two kinds. I couldn’t have gotten any better explanation than this.
Working with progenitor cells in regenerative biology gives you a highly controlled system, as opposed to working with a stem cell. In working with stem cells, you could end up creating the cells you don’t actually desire.
You should also know this. Throughout the entire body system, the progenitor cells are controlled by their neighboring stem cells, which constantly send signals over the progenitors. These signals could be “continuously divide”, in the case of the intestine. What scientists need to figure out is the exact signal that are being passed, and the specific pathways activated by such signals.
Once these signals are identified, scientists can now go in with chemicals (inhibitors or activators), to selectively turn on the signals to grow the particular organ we want, and when we want it. One of these advances made is the progenitor cell activator (PCA). The PCA can be applied to many tissues. The applications are infinite. Can be used in skin regeneration; in the case of burns or accident (goodbye to skin grafting, yeeey).
With this advances, it is an ultimate goodbye to degenerative diseases.
