regenerative medicine
Despite the tremendous progress made, medicine often still seems pretty much a plumbing business when you compare it with the way some living systems in nature do their own repairs and problem solving.
Mainstream medicine more often than not tries to fix things once they become symptomatic. Much less attention goes to early (pre-symptomatic) diagnosis and treatment, although prevention is on the agenda. In a sense, it is the mechanic’s mindset: when we find something’s wrong, we fix it; even if many times with the elegance of an elephant in a china store. It’s fixed, not ‘as good as new’ .
Some traditions of medicine – keep in mind that after there are more out there than the dominant one most of us in the Western world are used to, some predating our tradition by thousands of years – look at health and the body (cf. body as flows of energy, body as an ecology of tightly couple living systems at various scales vs. body as one vessel with many parts) hence also healing and treatment in different ways. In some the notion of preventive medicine and helping or (re)stimulating our body to help heal itself is much more predominant.
But now along comes regenerative medicine, an old new idea about stimulating the body to heal and even reconstruct itself. The promise of regenerative medicine is that one day, somewhere in the future Man regrows finger with pig bladder potion might no longer be an oddity in the newspaper, but as common as a bandage in your home first aid kit.
Alan Russell, Director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative medicine, gave a fascinating overview on the state of the art of the field (which undoubtedly made new progress in the time being) on TED Talks a while ago (see video).
Regenerative medicine he explains, rather than fixing something, is about initiating a true dialogue with the body, listening to it and talking to it, learning to speak its language so that we can trigger it to heal itself, to reconstruct tissues and organs as good as new, basically to relearn what it has unlearned. A mammalian fetus can regrow a limb in case it loses it within the first trimester of pregnancy, later on they lose that capacity as do we. In the animal world, some salamanders and newts can regenerate limbs (and even organs) throughout their lives.
Russell talks about three different ways through which to converse with the body to stimulate regeneration:
- cellular therapies (think stemcell therapy in heart and cardiovascular diseases, even preventively, hint: conserve your liposuction fluids as they contain useful stemcells)
- natural and designer materials to induce the body to heal itself (think material from the small intestine of pigs)
- smart systems/devices that can offload the work of the body and allow it to heal (think in-wound bioreactors/scaffolding to provide active feeding bed for tissues growth)
Regenerative medicine is no longer a dream, but an expanding highly multi/transdisciplinary field of research and solutions. In a sense it is a new worldview and world in the making. The impact, should we be able to make this breakthrough work goes beyond personal health and happiness. It is about reducing the costs of increasingly expensive healthcare as we age, maintaining quality of life at much higher levels of age, hence increasing the ratio of active vs. non-active population, etc. etc. So no wonder Japan, with is huge problem of its rapidly ageing population is the biggest sponsor for research in this area.
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