Prime Movers Lab Webinar Series: Regenerative Medicine
Exploring leading research and development in tissue repair and organ regeneration
If you had a chance to catch my “predictions” for the life sciences in 2022, you might have noted my enthusiasm for regenerative medicine. In fact, it was my top pick for an area to focus on this year. Regenerative medicine is the “process of replacing, engineering or regenerating human or animal cells, tissues or organs to restore or establish normal function.” Long before I was a neuroscientist, I was a budding (blebbing?) cell biologist. Curling up with my microscope and looking at cells and tissues was definitely one of my happy places when I was a kid. It led me to a cell and structural biology major in college — which eventually gave way to a specialization in neuroscience. One of the most captivating, and frankly, mysterious topics in cell biology was developmental biology. It always seemed to be one of the most perplexing elements in biology — how tiny balls of undifferentiated cells organized and patterned themselves into coherent structures like frogs, birds, and even humans. Truly a miracle.
Why do some cells and tissues regenerate — regrow — and others cannot? Why are humans different than salamanders or starfish when we lose a limb? Why can’t we regrow organs and no longer have to depend on donor tissues? When I was in grad school, there was a canon in the neurosciences — adult human brains cannot grow new neurons. Until…we discovered they could. Biology is like that — it gets you convinced that you’ve tracked it down, cornered it — and then it springs a surprise on you. I suspect we are in that same moment with regenerative medicine. There is an innate capability within the human body to repair and regenerate that we are just starting to understand how to harness.
Because I want you to tune in to the webinar that we are hosting on February 16, 2022 — I am not going to give away any of the punchlines. However, I will tantalize you with some exciting tidbits. First, on the webinar, we will be joined by three panelists who are each world-experts in their field.
Dr. Harald Ott — Dr. Ott is a thoracic surgeon and transplant specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has seen firsthand the challenges of organ transplantation and heartbreak that a lack of available donors creates. Currently, in the US alone there are over 100,000 individuals waiting for a transplant. Driven by the lack of available donor organs, he envisioned another solution entirely. He is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at IVIVA Medical, a company that Prime Movers Lab invested in last year. IVIVA is working to build organs, initially kidneys, that can live outside of the body (or eventually be implanted) using biologic scaffolds seeded with living cells. The goal is for these scaffolds is to become functional organ substitutes that perform as well as natural kidneys.
Dr. Eric Lagasse — Dr. Lagasse is an Associate Professor at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He is an expert in stem cell biology and similarly motivated by the need for organ repair and replacement. He has devised a different approach to entice the body to grow new organs on its own. Called ectopic organogenesis — it consists of coaxing lymph nodes to become internal bioreactors to generate new functional organ tissue at that site. Imagine that — a new organ inside of your own lymph node! Dr. Lagasse is also the Chief Scientific Officer of LyGenesis, a startup harnessing this technique and targeting end-stage liver disease, which afflicts millions of individuals worldwide.
Dr. Michael Levin — Dr. Levin is a Professor and Director at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University. He is a computer scientist and biologist and viewing tissue not from the perspective of medicine alone but from fundamental questions around the programming of tissues. He argues that focusing on genes is the wrong scale for tackling tissue regeneration — that we need to go UP a level or two and think about the innate intelligence of cells. He is clearly on to something — as his lab recently demonstrated, using their BioDome approach, frogs were able to regrow limb-like appendages. A great WSJ article gives the summary — and it’s very compelling. Dr. Levin is also working on several startups inspired by his work.
I know you’ll want to tune in to hear from these panelists — and it’s a unique opportunity to ask your burning questions about the field of regenerative medicine. Some topics I suspect we will cover include:
- Life span vs. healthspan & quality of life
- Longevity and hypotheses about organs and aging
- The collective intelligence of cells — our body’s innate ability to repair
- The future of regenerative medicine as a field
I think this is an exciting and incredibly optimistic topic to consider for the start of 2022. I hope you will join us on February 16th at 3 pm ET for this lively and far-reaching discussion on the intelligence of our bodies and the future of human health.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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