Regenerative Medicine Not So Far Away

The US Army has already developed a medicine to help regrow tissue and bone. Extracellular Matrix, he cream-colored crystallized powder, dubbed "magic dust," combines properties from the intestinal lining and the urinary bladder to make it into what it is. The medicine helps by giving the body`s natural healing powers a power boost, sort of tricking the body to think that it is back in the womb. One man who took part of the regenerative-medicine study after cutting off the tip of his finger in a model plane's propeller, had the substance applied to the wound, and after a month the body grew skin and tissue to renew the damaged finger. Whether it looked like a normal finger again, and to what extent the wound has healed was not told. Another medicinal breakthrough is a kind of engineered skin substitute. It is made from the patient`s own cells and about the size of a postage stamp. It could grow several times larger and can be used to prevent injection and can also placed over top of severely damaged skin to serve as new skin. The Army has also announced that a process to rebuild or regrow missing or damaged bone. A biodegradable scaffold is needed to be put in place of the missing/damaged bone to guide the regrowth. So far the only success the researchers have had is on test rats, which they have managed to restore 3cm of bone. They hope to achieve two more centimeters within two years. This technology is developped for injured soldiers and whether or not it will be available for the public was not told.

The picture to the right shows that the scaffold has already promoted bone regrowth in the rat. Before this, the bone was missing on the underside, and the new bone cells appears to be more greyish and transparent compared to the rest of the bones that were not damaged in this x-ray.