Webinar Recap: Regenerative Medicine
Unlocking the innate intelligence of the body to rebuild and repair
Last week, my colleague Bryan Bauw and I had the chance to sit down with three of the world’s experts in regenerative medicine for a wide-ranging discussion of how this rapidly evolving field will impact health and medicine in the future. As I predicted in my blog last week, the conversation was enthralling.
We heard from:
- Dr. Harald Ott — a thoracic surgeon and transplant specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Ott is also the Chief Scientific Officer of our portfolio company, IVIVA Medical.
- Dr. Eric Lagasse — an Associate Professor at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Lagasse is the Chief Scientific Officer of LyGenesis, a startup harnessing the power of lymph nodes as bioreactors.
- Dr. Michael Levin — a Professor and Director at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University. He is also the co-founder of a company working on limb regeneration, Morphoceuticals.
While I implore you to watch the webinar — as it will be one of the most optimistic pursuits you might possibly engage in this week — I will share a couple of insights in order to illustrate just how exciting our conversation was.
Why is this so hard?
As a reminder, regenerative medicine is the “process of replacing, engineering or regenerating human or animal cells, tissues or organs to restore or establish normal function.” The webinar focused on tissue engineering — and one of my first questions to the group addressed a question that has always plagued me — with all of our advances in medicine. Why hasn’t tissue or organ regeneration been solved yet? Dr. Ott, as a practicing surgeon, has seen incredible advances that have been made in acute care — recovery from injury and decreased mortality from trauma. However, given our longer lifespans — 3 out of 4 adults will be faced with a chronic condition or disease in which one of our major “systems” fails. We cannot age well and healthfully if this is the case. It appears that when damage happens to the body — there is the potential for true regeneration or healing but when the body tries to fix it without assistance — there is scarring, something goes wrong. We can replace enzymes and hormones — but we can’t quite pop up the stack high enough to reprogram a whole damaged organ system. There is a complexity to our organs and systems that biological research has not yet cracked. However, talking to these experts — a breakthrough seems imminent.
The innate intelligence of cells
To me, one of the most fascinating concepts is the assertion that cells and tissues know what to do on their own, we just need to put them in the right state to access that higher-level programming. To roughly quote Dr. Levin, we have been futzing with the hardware to try and reprogram tissues when we should really be thinking about how to work with the software. You should absolute listen to how Dr. Levin explains it — as it is so elegant. But as a simple summary — he argues that cells know exactly what to do — and if after injury you give a tissue the right mix of chemical signals and the right (bioelectric) stimulus that it will innately know what to do next. You don’t have to TELL a severed limb to make a foot. If you put it in the right conditions it WILL make a foot. Whoa. For me, this is one of the most revolutionary and thrilling things I have heard in biology in easily a decade or more.
Your body has bioreactors in it
I will admit to knowing that I have a lymphatic system, but not being an immunologist it’s never been a central focus of mine. Dr. Lagasse’s work has completely changed my mind on the power of the lymph node. Did you know we have 600 lymph nodes in our bodies? Typically the lymph nodes are called into service to filter our lymph and fight infection in our bodies. In them, B cells and T cells are activated to protect us from invaders and produce antibodies so that our properly functioning immune system can clear out the infection. Needless to say — lymph nodes are important and BUSY spots in our bodies. Their role in the immune system, it turns out, makes them handy in situ bioreactors for other cell types — not just immune cells. Dr. Lagasse’s group has shown that injecting donor liver cells into a lymph node in an animal that is experiencing liver failure will cause the animal’s body to grow an ectopic FUNCTIONING liver inside of the lymph node! And it’s not just liver cells that can take up residence in a lymph node — pancreas and thymus are good candidates as well. It turns out — you can regrow organs — you just have to do it in a place you might not have expected, in your own personal bioreactor (aka: lymph node)
The future of regenerative medicine
The future is bright, exciting, and inspiring. Each panelist offered some of their predictions for where the field is headed. Dr. Levin is motivated around the basic science of cells and tissues — how to communicate with and between cells and how to understand large-scale anatomical patterns. Once we know what the signals are, we can convince cells what to build and what we want them to build. Dr. Lagasse is optimistic about cell transplantation and how we can improve aging with all of the new techniques and technologies coming online. Dr. Ott, as the surgeon facing suffering patients each day, is thrilled to see how much basic science is being translated into new therapies. The combination of research and practice is quickly merging and accelerating to the most important outcome — solutions for patients in need. And perhaps soon, solutions for all of us to protect against the diseases of aging.
This was just a taste of what we discussed in the webinar. Watch the replay — and get just as excited as we did about the future of regenerative medicine. At Prime Movers Lab, this is an area of interest and focus for us in the coming year and we can’t wait to share more thoughts and insights with you.
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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