Regenerative Medicine Divide and Heal
In each of the tissues and organs of our bodies, there are groups of STEM cells. Most of the time, they don’t appear to be doing that much, but if you’re injured, the STEM cells leap into action and begin to divide and heal. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Barrett: Let’s say you get a cut in your skin. There are STEM cells that help to repair that. It’s as simple as that. They’re basically there as a pool of cells that can help the body to heal as you age and to maintain the tissue of your organs.
Doctor Jennifer Barrett is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech’s Marion Dupont Scott Equine Medical Center.
Barrett: There’s a number of different cells that help that, but we think that the STEM cells are key. If you have a bacterial infection that makes your intestinal lining get injured, you have STEM cells that line your intestines that will actually help to heal that.
The point is, even though we have STEM cells in each of our tissues, we still don’t heal optimally. People have arthritis, people have chronic tendonitis or tennis elbow or a rotator cup injury of the shoulder. Those are all examples of chronic overuse injuries that really need a boost of healing. And so, one of the strategies that is in place in the field of regenerative medicine, which involves stem cell biology one of the strategies is to take stem cells from a rich source, like your bone marrow or your fatty tissue, and expand them and grow them so that you have millions of the cells, and then, inject them into locations that have failed to heal.
Doctor Barrett and her team are using adult STEM cells to successfully heal injuries in horses and dogs. They hope to use the same procedures on humans in the near future. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.