The concept of rejuvenating our bodies through the use of stem cells is no longer a foreign idea. It comes with a degree of controversy as clinics offering stem cell treatment are popping up across the world making promises to cure diseases, restore joints, ease arthritis, and cure cancer. That promise remains tantalizing because the idea to be able to regenerate any damaged tissue in you using cells from you seems fantastic.

Why is the promise of stem cells possible?

The human body is unbelievably smart. It can recognize foreign cells and organ rejection can occur even in cases when a donor is considered to be a near-perfect match to the patient. But grow an identical heart derived from the patient’s own cells, and the results may be different. So in a world where technology is evolving to accommodate anything’s possible, why not tissue regeneration.

When did we take the first regenerative medicine steps?

It first started in 1954 with the first kidney transplant. And today, according to the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, there are 1,060 clinical trials and 900 companies globally focused on this field. Here’s an idea of what financing for the industry currently looks like:

Are Regenerative and Personalized Medicine One in the Same? 

Not quite. Regenerative is a subset of personalized medicine, an approach that attempts to tailor-fit treatment to an individual. It is a departure from the current practice by physicians and biomedical companies of “one-size-fits-all” medicine. It could mean tailoring or developing a unique drug treatment to match a person’s DNA. With regenerative medicine the treatment is designed to allow the body to repair itself through cell, tissue, and organ replacement. The treatments are hyper-customized using a patient’s own stem cells. As you can imagine, getting this type of treatment to scale is proving to be pretty expensive. But its promise has lured close to one thousand companies to work in the field as can be seen in the graphic displayed below.

Treatments Made Possible by Regenerative and Personalized Medicine

The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine has compiled the clinical trials by medical category. The largest number are devoted to oncology followed by heart and circulatory diseases, diseases of the central nervous system, and musculoskeletal diseases. A visual breakdown of trials can be seen in the image below:

Treatments currently on the leading edge include:

1. Reprogramming cells to fight disease. Through cellular immunotherapy, doctors are capable of altering white blood cells to attack and kill a patient’s cancer cells. Done by reprogramming cellular DNA, the treatment is succeeding with patients experiencing 100% recovery. As of 2019, this field of gene and gene-modified therapy is enjoying financing to the tune of $2.1 billion with funds for 374 ongoing clinical trials worldwide.
2. Disease-modeling and treatment personalization. Research at Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute has reached the point where researchers are using stem cells to create tissues or organs identical to those of a patient. The ability to grow complex cultures called organoids is allowing scientists to observe disease onset and test treatments. They are examining the effects on organoids to tailor-fit treatment to the patient. The research and clinical trials are showing promise but to date, only 46 clinical trials are ongoing globally with financing capped at $14 million as of 2019.
3. Regenerative surgery. Tissue engineering using stem cells and artificially made scaffolds is allowing scientists to maintain or restore damaged tissues and even entire organs. A great example of this is being deployed to repair damaged cartilage in knees and in treating degenerative diseases such as osteoarthritis. As of 2019, this branch of regenerative medicine has grown into an $823 million industry with 268 clinical trials currently ongoing around the world, the majority of them already in Phase II.

Regenerative is just getting started

As exciting as this burgeoning field is, the high cost involved and the cutting-edge nature of the technology is holding the field back. But the data shows that things are looking up. Research and Markets predicts a staggering 23.35% compound annual growth by 2022 compared to 2016 numbers. And experts forecast growth to $66 billion annually.

Why not? Lowered risks, minimally invasive procedures, and more efficient disease treatment and prevention should eventually guarantee lower costs and higher recovery and cure rates. Just what insurers, hospitals, and doctors want.

What the Heck is the Higgs Boson and What Does it Mean for Us in the 21st Century?

When scientists get excited about a discovery like the one announced this week it is hard not to jump on the bandwagon and acknowledge the progress made to unlock the mysteries of the Big Bang, matter, antimatter, dark matter, energy, dark energy and the quantum sub-atomic realm.

But what does the Higgs Boson particle discovery mean practically speaking? To answer this question you have to appreciate what this particle means to other sub-atomic particles. The Higgs Boson is the attractor that makes sub-atomic particles associate with each other. It acts like an invisible force field giving other particles their mass. Without the Higgs Boson electrons wouldn’t exist, and without electrons atoms wouldn’t exist, and without atoms we wouldn’t exist.

Consider the importance of electrons to our technical society (all of our energy and power generation is based on what electrons do) then it’s good to know our understanding of how things work in the universe is confirmed by this discovery.

Billions of dollars have been spent searching for the Higgs Boson as nations cooperated to build the Large Hadron Collider. And now with it built the Collider can make important contributions to science, and feed technology innovation in a number of fields from biomedicine, to manufacturing, to energy, computing and space science.

It’s hard not to argue that advances we have made in scientific discovery in the past have always led to new technology. So hats off to the scientists at CERN and to future discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider. And before I end this topic I leave you with the following:

Biomedicine Update: Move Over Higgs Boson as Researchers Discover Holy Grail of Tissue Engineering

Newts and other amphibians can regenerate lost limbs. Some reptiles can regenerate lost tails. Even humans can regenerate bone to heal fractures. But regenerating lost brain cells, heart muscle, or insulin-producing pancreatic cells has been only a dream until now.

Well according to the Journal, Comptes Rendus Biologies, scientists at the University of Paris Descartes and University of Maryland, adult bone marrow stem cells harvested from mice were used to generate multiple tissue types for use in cell replacement therapy.

If the mouse study can be replicated in humans we will have the ability to replace damaged organs without transplants and the need for immune suppressants.

Energy Update: Paint on Batteries

What if you could spray paint batteries on to any surface from a ceramic tile to a piece of paper? That’s exactly what researchers at Rice University, in Texas, hope to achieve. They have developed technology to spray-paint battery structures on surfaces. The anode and cathode, that is the negative and positive halves of the battery are kept apart using poly-methyl methacrylate. A sequence of five separate paint layers, each no more than 0.5 millimeters in thickness, makes a battery with efficiencies equivalent to the traditional lithium-ion batteries we use today in portable electronics. The flexibility these batteries provide should make them attractive to consumer-electronics and industrial manufacturers.

Materials Science Update: New Adhesives Created from Barnacles

Current adhesives are typically made from petroleum byproducts. But nature demonstrates adhesives with remarkable bonding capability, almost impossible to break. The Buoy Barnacle, Dosima Fascicularis, produces an adhesive that allows it to stick almost anywhere in the marine environment. Naturally its adhesive can cure under water.

So a research team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in Bremen, Germany, is studying the barnacle to isolate the amino acids and proteins that constitute the properties of the adhesive with the goal to use it in medical applications such as closing surgical incisions, and supporting pins and screws in repairing bone fractures.

Space Science Update: Could We Build the U.S.S. Enterprise Today?

An engineer has proposed that much of the technology needed to build a starship like Enterprise exists today not including warp engine technology and transporters. For example we have technology today that was seen as futuristic in the 1960s when Star Trek first appeared on television. Touch screens, communicators, sliding doors, talking computers, and replicators (think 3D printers) are available to us today. Even impulse engines represent technology currently under development in NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory.

Unlike the TV Enterprise, the one proposed would use a rotating structure in the saucer section of the spacecraft to create artificial gravity.

You can check out the website at BuildtheEnterprise.org.