Regeneration of damaged tissues and organs in vivo

Developers

J. Becerra, M. Giacca, S. J. Forbes etc.

Description of the technology

Organ growing in vitro for the following transplantation has considerably changed modern medicine. However, an equally important line of research in regenerative medicine is development of methods allowing to stimulate regeneration in the organism and, therefore, trigger processes of self-healing in damaged organs and tissues. This approach can help to restore lost functions of a certain organ. Moreover, it has several advantages over the organ transplantation: it has lower cost price, it is safer and makes it possible to reject the use of immunosuppressants completely or, at least, to use milder ones.

In the clinical practice, various pharmacological and physical (for example, ultrasound) impacts, as well as a procedure of cell transplantation, and a procedure of tissue regeneration in situ are used to stimulate regeneration of damaged tissues and organs.

Technology of cell transplantation makes it possible to compensate missing clones of specialized cells in a damaged organ, increase the pool of functioning cells, and activate regenerative and proliferative ability of undestroyed cells of the damaged organ. This technology has two distinct varieties. The first one — earlier — is basing on the use of specialized (differentiated) cells from growing organisms (human organism and organisms of animals). The second one is basing on the use of human stem cell (undifferentiated cells). It should be noted that in many cases, the clinical effect of the cell therapy is time-limited. Thus, if it is used for treatment of hypothyroidism, diabetes, Wilson’s disease, the effect of the therapy does not last more than 6–12 months. The reason is in that the recipient organ does not have appropriate environment for the survival and development of the transplanted cells.

The procedure of tissue regeneration in situ is one of the newest approaches for restoration of damaged tissues and organs. It exploits intrinsic capacity of the organism to regenerate by means of mobilization of endogenous stem cells or tissue-specific progenitor cells to the site of damage. In order to create and control microenvironment of the cells being mobilized, scientists intended to implant special matrices made of biomaterials into the damaged organ.

Practical application

Technology of tissue and organ regeneration in vivo develops intensively. It is an alternative to the method of tissue and organ transplantation. It may be used to treat various diseases, including age-dependent ones. Up to date, it has been already shown that the therapy using stem cells shows positive effect in the treatment of such diseases as heart attack, stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes mellitus etc. However, it is obvious that this technology is mainly suitable to remove rather small defects of organs.

Laboratories

• The LABRET (Laboratory for Bioengineering and Tissue Regeneration), BIONAND (Andalusian Centre for Nanomedicine and Biotechnology), Campanillas, Málaga (Spain).
• Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, Hangzhou (China).
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York (USA).
• Molecular Medicine Laboratory, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), Trieste (Italy).
• Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria (Australia).
• MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh (Great Britain).

Links

Publications

• Онищенко, Н. А. «Клеточные технологии и современная медицина." Бюл. эксперим. биол. и мед 1 (2004): 2–10.
• Längle, Daniel, et al. «Small molecules targeting in vivo tissue regeneration." ACS chemical biology 9.1 (2014): 57–71.
• Boerckel, Joel D., et al. «Mechanical regulation of vascular growth and tissue regeneration in vivo." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.37 (2011): E674-E680.
• Liu, Hua, et al. «In vivo liver regeneration potential of human induced pluripotent stem cells from diverse origins." Science translational medicine 3.82 (2011): 82ra39-82ra39.
• Forbes, Stuart J., and Nadia Rosenthal. «Preparing the ground for tissue regeneration: from mechanism to therapy." Nature medicine 20.8 (2014): 857–869.
• Lee, Sang Jin, et al. «Host cell mobilization for in situ tissue regeneration." Rejuvenation research 11.4 (2008): 747–756.
• Eulalio, Ana, et al. «Functional screening identifies miRNAs inducing cardiac regeneration." Nature 492.7429 (2012): 376–381.