The return, and regeneration, of Professor Membrane

I am dragging the Professor out of the archives to headline a series of link posts I’m going to be doing about medical “we live in science fiction now” stories (and maybe some medical “mad science”) pieces as well. I’ve been gathering these stories for quite some time–each one alone is a bit shocking or amazing, but when you start to see them piled atop each other, the effect is really kind of staggering… staggering in a hey-my-generation-is-supposed-to-be-future-shock-proof way.

So let’s start by talking about regeneration. Not Time Lord stuff, but actual medical technology that might allow us to grow replacement body parts. This is one area where there seems to be just story after story over the past few years. Let’s start with some that are a bit older, and see if we can’t catch up to the bleeding edge, as ’twere, over the series of posts.

Regeneration, in the most basic sense, I guess is about the ability to regrow body parts. While researching this problem may lead to some pretty serious complexion issues in fiction, it’s something that science is pretty hard at work on, on a number of fronts. For example, science has already produced a way to regrow a lost fingertip, using strange and complex technologies referred to as “pixie dust”. Well, OK, it’s actually called “extracellular matrix”, but whatever you call it, there’s no arguing with the images in the video at the BBC report on the stuff. Regrown with complete feeling and completely movement–I wish I had had some of that dust around when I cut the end off my thumb, since while it did heal it has no sensation at all.

Pixie dust is just the beginning of the story though. Look at this quote from a CBS news story on the same topic:

Dr. Atala, one of the pioneers of regeneration, believes every type of tissue already has cells ready to regenerate if only researchers can prod them into action. Sometimes that prodding can look like science fiction.

Emerging from an everyday ink jet printer is the heart of a mouse. Mouse heart cells go into the ink cartridge and are then sprayed down in a heart shaped pattern layer by layer.

Dr. Atala believes it’s a matter of time before someone grows a human heart.

I can almost hear you thinking “that’s quite far away, though, isn’t it”. Well, keep reading:

In this clinical trial at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Patrick Shenot is performing a bladder transplant with an organ built with this patient’s own cells. In a process developed by Dr. Atala, the patient’s cells were grown in a lab, and then seeded on a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold.

Eight weeks later, with the scaffold now infused with millions of regrown cells, it is transplanted into the patient. When the scaffold dissolves, Dr. Shenot says what’s left will be a new, functioning organ.

“The cells will differentiate into the two major cells in the bladder wall, the muscle cells and the lining cells,” he explained. “It’s very much the future, but it’s today. We are doing this today.”

Note that the story is from almost two years ago. And read the rest of it, especially the bits about the military interest.

See, in 2008, the US military created the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to look at this stuff. And even then, things were moving along nicely. Here’s a quote from a Slate article about it:

If you’ve been following Human Nature for the past three years, you know that tissue regeneration is well underway. The military has been working on regrowing lost body parts using extracellular matrices. Scientists in labs have grown blood vessels, livers, bladders, breast implants, and meat. This year they announced the production of beating, disembodied rat hearts. At yesterday’s press conference, Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker explained that our bodies systematically generate liver cells and bone marrow and that this ability can be redirected through “the right kind of stimulation.”

I like that the author of that piece also does some pondering on just how much we’re taking this all in stride, and on what it might mean for the next generation.

Oh, and I should really link to this picture, from an AFIRM presentation, just so I have an excuse to mention the Ear Mouse. While the Ear Mouse might seem creepy, if I (or one of my loved ones) needed a replacement ear, I bet I wouldn’t care much about that. All mouse-weirdness aside, if military research leads to soldiers wounded in battle getting to regrow limbs, and that trickles out to allow people wounded in accidents, or civilian “collateral damage” from military operations being able to regrown things, I am totally OK with that.

Of course, things don’t have to be that extreme. It doesn’t have to be life-or-death, or crippling or disfiguring injuries. My teeth are a mess, and I would be delighted if science would come along with a way to regenerate, or regrow, them. Oh wait. They’re on that.

In that story from 2002 we read:

She predicted that within five years, we would know whether dental stem cells could be manipulated to bioengineer teeth. To generate a human tooth might take an additional five to 10 years.

In a 2004 story we read:

The procedure is fairly simple. Doctors take stem cells from the patient. These are unique in their ability to form any of the tissues that make up the body. By carefully nurturing the stem cells in a laboratory, scientists can nudge the cells down a path that will make them grow into a tooth. After a couple of weeks, the ball of cells, known as a bud, is ready to be implanted. Tests reveal what type of tooth – for example, a molar or an incisor – the bud will form.

Using a local anaesthetic, the tooth bud is inserted through a small incision into the gum. Within months, the cells will have matured into a fully-formed tooth, fused to the jawbone. As the tooth grows, it releases chemicals that encourage nerves and blood vessels to link up with it.

In a 2009 story, we read about researchers in Japan actually doing this with mice.

And, of course, that’s not the only angle of attack. You don’t have to replace the teeth if you can just repair decay:

By putting a layer of the solution on individual test teeth, Marshall has already been able to remineralize some parts of the teeth. The challenge is to get the crystals to regrow throughout the dentin.

To heal properly, the crystals need to form from the bottom of the tooth up to the enamel. Marshall isn’t sure whether that’s happening yet, but she is confident that she’ll find a way to restore dentin functionality over the next few years.

[…]

“We’re still a ways from being able to grow back dentin and enamel,” Bayne said.

That’s a 2008 story, by the way.

While we’re talking about regrowing things in the mouth–and I hope you’re ready for some real sensawunda stuff–did you see about the researchers who grew a man a new jawbone… in his own stomach?

Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient’s upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.

Yeah. They did that. Two years ago.

And, it’s not just bone and skin that needs regenerating. What about someone who’s had, say, a spinal injury and sustained nerve damage. Yeah, they’re on that too. In this case, it’s not just the regeneration research, but also research into using other nerve paths if the spinal nerves are blocked, or into just straight-up manufacturing new artificial nerve fibres:

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University have designed a self-assembling electronic wire which is destined for the use inside a human body. The organic wire is water-soluble and it’s made of lightweight carbon materials and many wires like these could power pacemakers, stimulate organic function and reconnect damaged nerve tissue.

Although we will not transform ourselves in Borgs or robots, these organic wires will help paralyzed people to restore their nerve fibers thanks to the self-assembly process. These wires are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair and they have the possibility to interact with individual cells from our body, and once the nerve cells are reconnected, paralytics will regain their mobility.

The problem is that for the moment this type of procedure is really possible, but in the near future the technique could be perfected.

Besides tricking the body into growing new parts, or reusing the parts that are already there in a new way, or hooking up to artificial new parts, there are still other kinds of regeneration. Like that whole research into brain rejuvenation by injection with infant umbilical blood… but it’s getting late now, and besides that particular one just kind of freaks me out with the whole “ancient rich baby vampires” angle that’s so obvious when you mix that research with the distribution of wealth disparity in our society.

So let’s just call that enough for this post.