United Brachial Plexus Network, Inc.

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You might become a believer in the power of magic dust, when you see how a special powder re-grew the tip of Lee Spievack's finger.

He sliced off a half inch of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane. His finger never even formed a scar.

"Your finger grew back flesh, blood, vessels and nail?" CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports.

"Four weeks," Spievak said.

Is this essentially what re-grew Spievak's finger.

This powder is a medical product called extracellular matrix. Made from pig bladders, it is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons.

But it's the matrix's unusual power to regenerate tissue that's helping launch a new field: regenerative medicine.

"It tells the body, start that process of tissue re-growth," said Dr. Stephen Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Regenerative Medicine.

Badylak believes the matrix somehow mobilizes cells, some of them adult stem cells whose job it is to maintain and repair injured tissue.

"It will change the body from thinking that its responding to inflammation and injury to thinking that it needs to re-grow normal tissue," Badylak said.

If this helped Mr Spievak's finger re-grow, could you grow a whole limb?

"In theory," Badylak said.

That theory, that it might be possible to re-grow a limb, is about to be tested by the United States Military. The Army, working in conjuction with the University of Pittsburgh, is about to use that matrix on the amputated fingers of soldiers home from the war.

Dr. Steven Wolf, at the Army Institute of Surgical Research, says the military has invested millions of dollars in Regenerative research, hoping to re-grow limbs, lost muscle, even burned skin.

"And it's hard to ignore this guys missing half his skin, this guy's missing his leg," Wolf said. "Is there any way we can make that grow back? Some of that technology exists and now its time to field it."

Several different technologies for harnessing regeneration are now in clinical trials around the world. One machine, being tested in Germany, sprays a burn patient's own cells onto a burn, signaling the skin to re-grow.

Badylak is about to implant matrix material - shaped like an esophagus - into patients with throat cancer.

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A few days after Lee Spievack canceled his appointment with the hand surgeon, he received a package from his older brother containing a vial of powder that looked like Kraft Parmesan cheese. His brother instructed him to sprinkle it on his finger every other day until the powder was gone.

Lee Spievack is not a man who asks a lot of questions. So in the case of the vial, Spievack didn't much care what it contained (ground-up pig bladder) or where it came from (a little farm in Albion, Indiana).

Albion is a speck of a town about a forty-minute drive from Fort Wayne on some of the flattest land in America. The Whiteshire Hamroc farm is located a few miles off the main road and its prim little houses, around the corner from an abandoned nineteenth-century schoolhouse, and down past some cornfields.

The Whiteshire Hamroc farm raises a special line of genetically linked pigs that are reared indoors and sequestered from disease. The idea is that if pig parts are going in humans — and they have already been used, by the thousands — then the pigs need to be as clean as possible. The pigs at the Whiteshire Hamroc farm are some of the most pampered swine in the world. They inhale filtered air. When they are behaving, they are fed strawberry and vanilla ice cream. The handlers tried chocolate, but the pigs demurred.

Sherry Ziobro, an attractive former student-loan executive who now brokers pig bladders and other tissues, recently arranged a tour of the facilities. Before entering, visitors must shower and change into farm-approved clothing — Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts, blue flannel pajama pants, a gray T-shirt, tube socks, and black sneakers — all in an effort to prevent as much bacteria as possible from coming into contact with the pigs. A filtration mask that covers the mouth and nose is also required, though not for the visitors' benefit — even through a mask, specially raised pigs smell terrible.

Inside, the pigs seemed remarkably content. The barn housed litters that had been born the day before (the mothers resting on their sides while the piglets fed), adolescent pigs who tried to nip at their guests, and some older pigs, of an age and size that would soon have them embarking on the hour's drive to Tippecanoe, Indiana, to visit the Vin-Lee-Ron slaughterhouse (founded by Vin, Lee, and Ron).

About eleven hundred pigs meet their maker each day at Vin-Lee-Ron. They start in pens, then make their way forward on a conveyor belt, snorting and whining louder the farther they get. "Pigs are smart. They know," explained the slaughterhouse manager. The pigs ride up the belt until they eventually meet a man who shocks them with two hundred volts, killing them instantly, though they still convulse for a few seconds. Another man slits their throats, and they bleed out for seven minutes. The pigs are then conveyed to various cutting stations, where assembly-line workers slice out specific parts. It takes about two seconds to slice out a bladder, which looks like a water balloon. It is then stored in a cooler and taken to a lab, where it is processed and either turned into a sheet like waxed paper or ground into powder.

Spievack followed his brother's directions: Every other day for the next eight days, he sat down at his living-room coffee table and sprinkled the powder on his finger. Whatever powder fell onto the table he scooped up with a piece of paper, then dropped back into the vial. He covered his finger with a Band-Aid. A few days went by, and Spievack could see something was happening. There was skin growing, and tissue on the inside, too. He insists that what happened after four weeks did not surprise him in the least, though it should have. Because his fingertip grew back.

The fingerprint took a couple more months. The tip is a little hard on the end, but he can feel things just fine. Spievack says he was particularly happy this past winter; while all of his fingers chapped in the cold weather, the new fingertip didn't. The only side effect during treatment was that his finger began to smell like a pig's quarters at the state fair. "It was a pretty offensive odor," Spievack says. He doesn't much think about his finger anymore, except when he clips his nails. He usually cuts them once a week, but the new nail has to be clipped every two days. "That fingernail grows like a son of a bitch," he says.

Asking Badylak what happened with Spievack's finger does not produce an exceptionally long answer: He doesn't really know. He can't fully explain why the scaffolds do what they do, and until he can explain that, he cannot manipulate the technology to grow back entire digits or organs. He's getting there, but he's not there yet.

Still, the scaffolds have already been used in more than a million patients to regrow cartilage in sports injuries, rebuild urethras, and repair hernias, and Badylak's lab will start testing the technology on human esophagi soon.

Meanwhile, Alan Spievack's company, ACell, has had tremendous success with veterinary applications. Not long ago, in his house near Boston, Spievack pulled up an image of a horse with a deep hole in his face as wide as a hand. "This is Classy," Spievack said. "Now, Classy is your typical unlucky horse, et cetera." The horse had run into a fence and gouged out his face, including a big chunk of bone. Surgeons at Colorado State University inserted the pig-bladder material into the hole during several surgeries over about a year. There were pictures of the operations, which were bloody. Then there was a picture of Classy, with his face completely healed. "I know that good things can happen with this as a matrix and that there are a lot of different applications," Badylak says. "I'm also just as sure that people will not regrow whole digits if you just put the powder on. There's missing pieces to the puzzle. The problem is I don't know how big the puzzle is."

There are scientists who question whether the powder was really the catalyst for what happened to Spievack's finger. Ken Muneoka, a Tulane scientist who has been working on tissue regeneration for two decades, says his own research suggests that fingertips can grow back on their own, even in a man's Spievack's age. He cautions that Spievack's finger did not grow back in a controlled study — meaning the injury and the response to it were not compared with someone else's in the same circumstances who didn't undergo treatment. Badylak doesn't deny the controlled-study issue, but he disputes the notion that someone as old as Spievack could grow the tip back on his own.

Some of this back-and-forth is the scientific equivalent of playground trash talk. Both Muneoka and Badylak are at the center of a sort of Manhattan Project to regrow limbs. The Defense Department research-and-development agency DARPA, located not far from the Pentagon in northern Virginia, has been closely watching the progress of limb regeneration, given the thousands of soldiers coming home from Iraq after getting body parts blown off. The agency is now spending about $8 million to fund two teams of researchers racing to regrow toes in mice. The upcoming year is make-or-break: They must show DARPA that they can successfully take the first step and grow a blastema — a collection of cells that can form a new body part. If they can do that, a toe is not far behind. One of the teams, led by Muneoka, is growing extra arms on salamanders to see how the process might eventually be stimulated in humans. Badylak leads the other team, which is trying to understand the role of the scaffolds. Meanwhile, Badylak is also advising surgeons at the Army Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio on a project to use the extracellular matrix to help soldiers returning from the war who have lost digits. He says the project will be successful if the soldiers can grow back a little more than an inch of tissue. "There is some sense of competition," says Muneoka. "Because at the end of the day, as we move to the next level of this type of work, not everyone's gonna be sitting in the boat."

Badylak is confident about his method, but he also believes that his approach alone isn't going to fully unlock the body's regenerative potential. There are researchers trying other methods. Many are adamant that pig material doesn't need to be used at all — that artificial scaffolds can work better and faster. Other researchers are using the scaffolds in entirely different ways. Anthony Atala, a urologist at Wake Forest and editor of the definitive Principles of Regenerative Medicine, takes cells from his patient's bodies and grows them new bladders on large part-biological and part-artificial scaffolds in a lab. Seven weeks later, he implants the bladders in the body.

Badylak says he does not want to be known as "the guy who grows fingers," because he's not sure he can do it, at least not yet. But like it or not, pleas for his help reach him daily in the form of e-mails, letters, and phone calls. His face sinks as he describes one:

"I'm a mother from Bologna, Italy, my daughter was born with a defective hand. She's three years old now. She's being made fun of in school. We'd like her to have a normal life. She's a beautiful child. You know, we read about this, and we're willing to travel to the States. What can you do for us?"

Badylak pauses for a moment. "They're just heartbreaking. I got another last week from the family of a little girl that fell off a wagon and into a meat grinder — it included a picture of her hand all chopped up."

For now, Badylak works at that potentially frustrating scientific junction of having achieved something remarkable but not being able to explain exactly how he did it. "It's a lot of fun," he says. "Much better than not being able to do it at all. If you know that it can happen, then it's easy to remain enthusiastic and motivated about looking for the reasons why. If you don't know for sure that it can happen, then you start to wonder if there is even an answer at all."

For Badylak, the wondering is over. The puzzle may be incomplete, but the answer, he knows, lives in Cincinnati, snapping together parts of model airplanes.

Truely astonishing work!!! I was just wondering about the last sentence "The puzzle may be incomplete, but the answer, he knows, lives in Cincinnati, snapping together parts of model airplanes." I know I'm probably missing something right in front of my face, I'm just 30-45 min north of Cincinnati! Thanks for the remarkable info, can't wait to hear more!! I feel we're all obligated to give these war Heroes all we can for defending our great Nation and freedom, to try and give them some part of a normal life we can!!
God bless,
Brent