Regeneration recipe: Pinch of pig, cell of lizard

[Christopher]

It would be great if all we had to do to cure a TBPI was to chop off the arm and grow a brand new one!

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17171083/from/ET/

In an August 2005 accident, about a half inch
was cut off the tip of Lee Spievack's right middle
finger by a gas powered model airplane propeller.
He says the finger grew back to normal with the
help of an experimental treatment.

Updated: 5:19 a.m. AKT Feb 19, 2007
Al Behrman / AP file

Regeneration recipe: Pinch of pig, cell of lizard

Researchers look to porcine bladders, salamanders, mice to regrow limbs


In an August 2005 accident, about a half inch was cut off the tip of Lee Spievack's right middle finger by a gas powered model airplane propeller. He says the finger grew back to normal with the help of an experimental treatment.

Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers — and someday, even limbs — with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel.

There’s the guy who sliced off a fingertip but grew it back, after he treated the wound with an extract of pig bladder. And the scientists who grow extra arms on salamanders. And the laboratory mice with the eerie ability to heal themselves.

This summer, scientists are planning to see whether the powdered pig extract can help injured soldiers regrow parts of their fingers. And a large federally funded project is trying to unlock the secrets of how some animals regrow body parts so well, with hopes of applying the the lessons to humans.

The implications for regrowing fingers go beyond the cosmetic. People who are missing all or most of their fingers, as from an explosion or a fire, often can’t pick things up, brush their teeth or button a button. If they could grow even a small stub, it could make a huge difference in their lives.

And the lessons learned from studying regrowth of fingers and limbs could aid the larger field of regenerative medicine, perhaps someday helping people replace damaged parts of their hearts and spinal cords, and heal wounds and burns with new skin instead of scar.

Four months for a new fingertip
But that’s in the future. For now, consider the situation of Lee Spievack, a hobby-store salesman in Cincinnati, as he regarded his severed right middle finger one evening in August 2005.

He had been helping a customer with an engine on a model airplane behind the shop. He knew the motor was risky because it required somebody to turn the prop backwards to make it run the right way.

“I pointed to it,” Spievack recalled the other day, “and said, ‘You need to get rid of this engine, it’s too dangerous.’ And I put my finger through the prop.”

He’d misjudged the distance to the spinning plastic prop. It sliced off his fingertip, leaving just a bit of the nail bed. The missing piece, three-eighths of an inch long, was never found.

An emergency room doctor wrapped up the rest of his finger and sent him to a hand surgeon, who recommended a skin graft to cover what was left of his finger. What was gone, it appeared, was gone forever.

If Spievack, now 68, had been a toddler, things might have been different. Up to about age 2, people can consistently regrow fingertips, says Dr. Stephen Badylak, a regeneration expert at the University of Pittsburgh. But that’s rare in adults, he said.

Spievack, however, did have a major advantage — a brother, Alan, a former Harvard surgeon who’d founded a company called ACell Inc., that makes an extract of pig bladder for promoting healing and tissue regeneration.

It helps horses regrow ligaments, for example, and the federal government has given clearance to market it for use in people. Similar formulations have been used in many people to do things like treat ulcers and other wounds and help make cartilage.

The summer before Lee Spievack’s accident, Dr. Alan Spievack had used it on a neighbor who’d cut his fingertip off on a tablesaw. The man’s fingertip grew back over four to six weeks, Alan Spievack said.

Lee Spievack took his brother’s advice to forget about a skin graft and try the pig powder.

Soon a shipment of the stuff arrived and Lee Spievack started applying it every two days. Within four weeks his finger had regained its original length, he says, and in four months “it looked like my normal finger.”

Spievack said it’s a little hard, as if calloused, and there’s a slight scar on the end. The nail continues to grow at twice the speed of his other nails.

“All my fingers in this cold weather have cracked except that one,” he said.

All in all, he said, “I’m quite impressed.”

[Christopher]

$250 Million and actual patients under trial.
If this works at all in its current form, we'll know soon.


CNN video news clip (graphic)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/26/re ... nnSTCVideo
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/26/re ... cnnSTCText
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Salamander-inspired therapy may aid injured vets

* Story Highlights
* "Regenerative medicine" pursued by the Pentagon, top U.S. and medical facilities
* Key to regeneration is powder nicknamed "pixie dust"
* Powder forms a microscopic "scaffold" that helps cells grow into desired tissue

By Larry Shaughnessy
CNN Pentagon Producer

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (CNN) -- Last week in an operating room in Texas, a wounded American soldier underwent a history-making procedure that could help him regrow the finger that was lost to a bomb attack in Baghdad, Iraq, last year.

Army Sgt. Shiloh Harris' doctors applied specially formulated powder to what's left of the finger in an effort to do for wounded soldiers what salamanders can do naturally: replace missing body parts.

If it sounds like science fiction, the lead surgeon agreed.

"It is. But science fiction eventually becomes true, doesn't it?" asked Dr. Steven Wolf of Brooke Army Medical Center.

Harris' surgery is part of a major medical study of "regenerative medicine" being pursued by the Pentagon and several of the nation's top medical facilities, including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic. Nearly $250 million has been dedicated to the research.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. Israel Del Toro is one of the wounded vets who might one day benefit from this research. He was injured by a bomb in Afghanistan. Both his hands were badly burned. On his left hand, what was left of his fingers fused together.

"You know, in the beginning, when I first got hurt, I told them, just cut it off. So I can get some function," Del Toro said. His doctors did not cut off his injured left arm. And since that injury, advancements in burn and amputation treatment mean he may one day be able to use his fingers again. VideoWatch more on regenerative medicine »

A key to the research dedicated to regrowing fingers and other body parts is a powder, nicknamed "pixie dust" by some of the people at Brooke. It's made from tissue extracted from pigs.

The pixie dust powder itself doesn't regrow the missing tissue; it tricks the patient's body into doing that itself.

All bodies have stem cells. As we are developing in our mothers' wombs, those stem cells grow our fingers, toes, organs -- essentially, our whole body. The stem cells stop doing that around birth, but they don't go away. The researchers believe that the "pixie dust" can put those stem cells back to work growing new body parts.

The powder forms a microscopic "scaffold" that attracts stem cells and convinces them to grow into the tissue that used to be there.

"If it is next to the skin, it will start making skin. If it's next to a tendon, it will start making a tendon, and so that's the hope, at least in this particular project, that we can grow a finger," Wolf said.

It has worked in earlier experiments. "They have taken a uterus out of a dog, made one in the lab, put it back in and had puppies," Wolf said. Researchers have also regrown a human bladder and implanted it in a person, and it is working as nature intended.

Although the technique has incredible promise, doctors will be watching for unexpected side effects as they follow Harris' recovery. "It could grow a cancer," Wolf said. "We will be closely monitoring for that to make sure that doesn't happen."

If the military's most badly wounded start benefiting, so will civilians. "If we can pull this off in missing parts the next step is, OK, can we grow a pancreas? Can we grow and replace that in a diabetic? And can we do the same thing with a kidney and can we do the same thing with a heart?"

One day, he hopes, people with heart trouble will be told, "That's OK. We will just grow you another one."

"That is something that is real science fiction."

CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr contributed to this report.