Regenerative Medicine
The Future of Healing
How does Regenerative Medicine Work?
Did you know that...?
A young salamander can regrow a whole leg in about five weeks.
The human liver can regrow after damage.
The planarian can regenerate from either a head or a tail piece.
The salamander can regenerate limbs, hearts, tails, brains, eye tissues, kidneys, brains and spinal cords throughout life.
This is a cross-section of a regenerating salamander limb; Green = limb muscle fibers; Red = skin.
Zebrafish can regenerate heart tissue without relying on stem cells.
waiting list has more than doubled but the amount of organs available for transplantation has barely even increased. Also, since the donor organ is not your own, there is a chance that the body will reject the organ, making the whole procedure a waste of time and money. In order to save time, money, and ultimately to save lives, scientists have developed technologies to try to increase the quality of life to those living with organ failure. The research these scientists have been working on has been coined "Regenerative Medicine".
Many animals and even some parts of our human body can regenerate without the use of stem cell therepys. In the human body, the liver can regrow back to it's original size after injury under certain conditions but the brain can not. Why is it that only certain organs have the ability to regenerate? Regenerative scientists all over the world have been testing the waters of regenerative medicine and have made some huge discoveries relating to organ regeneration.
What is Regenerative Medicine?
According to any dictionary, regenerative medicine would be defined as the branch of medicine involved in studying the body's mechanisms for healing itself, but regenerative medicine is so much more complex than just the study of the body and its healing powers. Regenerative medicine is an emerging field in biology and medical engineering that has the ability to revolutionize the way people look at diseases in the future. It has always been thought of as science fiction to be able to just grow a new organ after one got damage or to have the ability to use the patient's own cells to cure debilitating diseases such as neurological, autoimmune, and cardiovascular disorders but now with the emerging field of regenerative medicine, it is all scientifically possible.
Why is Regenerative Medicine needed?
Organ failure is one of the top reasons people die in the United States each year and before scientists developed techniques to help people using regenerative medicine, one of the only ways to survive organ failure was to receive an organ transplant from a viable donor. Of course, there are many problems tied to receiving a donor organ. First, the donor organ waiting list is very long and gets longer each year with more people needing organs but only about the same amount of donor organs coming in. The chart shown demonstrates how, over the years, the amount of people on the