Scientists Search Starfish For Key to Human Regeneration

Hoping to discover whether the limb-regrowing powers of creatures like starfish and salamanders hold the secret to human renewal, University of Florida researchers are set to embark on a $6 million Regeneration Project.

Yesterday I talked with Dennis Steindler, project leader and head of the U of F's McKnight Brain Institute, about research developments that have laid a foundation for the latest wave of regeneration research. Said Dennis:

The big question everybody thought about in what used to be called developmental biology, is now called regenerative medicine, is this: why do some organisms readily repair themselves, and others don’t? And even in a single large organism, why do some tissues reapir themselves and regenerate, and others don’t? We needed to get to a level, thanks to the revolution in molecular genetics and now the revolution in stem cell biology, where we could really tackle those questions.

Now we have the human genome mapped, and genomes are being mapped from almost every organism you can think of. We needed to know that there are so-called adult stem cells, or tissue-specific stem cells, in all organisms. These are there not by coincidence but to attempt and often succeed at repairing injury. Even the adult human brain has a persistent stem cell population that lives in an area we used to anecdotally refer to as brain marrow, which looks like bone marrow, which makes blood and other cells.

We needed to know that these cells exist, and where they do, and that if there are not stem cells in all tissues and organisms, there are certainly progenitor cells that persist all through life that have certain stem cell-like qualities and often attempt repair all by themselves -- but, depending on injury or disease, they get overwhelmed and fail at regeneration.

All this is coming together now -- not just relating to human regeneration, but to other organisms. And we’ve got the material I think we need now to start to comparing them.

Previous Wired coverage of regenerative medicine here and here.

Image: Vanessa