Channel: Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology clear
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| 1 | Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology | What is Regenerative Medicine? | 1306 | 23 | 50.7 | 5:29 | The regenerative medicine is an exciting new field with the potential for providing better lives for millions of people. From cut nerves to damaged hearts, regenerative medicine may have the answers to restoring victims of disease and accidents to their once healthy state. But what is it exactly? Renovarison is a scientific field that aims at developing new approaches and tools to promote tissue regeneration and also trying to understand basic principles and mechanisms. So it is very important for the regenerative medicine field to understand what are the basic set of cues, including environmental cues, biological cues, and cellular cues in the particular tissue environment that stimulates tissue growth. Here at the Institute for Nanobio technology at Johns Hopkins University, researchers are working to provide these answers to a number of clinical applications. So one approach to tissue engineering is re-engineering and repairing damage to the central or peripheral nervous system. And the idea here is again to recreate chemical signals, biological signals that nerve cells brought the broad class of nerve cells that are necessary to repair would be able to have the same types of chemical interactions with the native environment to a scaffold that will present the same kind of chemistry. This often involves a very complex molecular and polymer engineering approach to very chemistry, to very porosity, to very mechanical properties in a way that cells then think they are interacting with a native substrate or native surface that would be necessary to encourage the regrowth of new neural cells or establishing reconnections among these cells. So it is known that certain cells, particularly neurons, are sensitive to electrical stimuli, and their ability to regenerate can be influenced by the presence of an electric field. However, electrical conductors are typically made of metals and other kinds of inorganic complexes. So this is an issue since cells will see these materials as foreign objects and therefore won't like to adhere to them. So using the chemistry that we can present on these materials in terms of interfacing with cells, we then create the artificial function by way of incorporating the electronic or the optical materials. And then these then are carried into the final overall scaffold material. Regenerative medicine is not limited to damage to the nervous system. Another group at the Hopkins Medical Campus utilizes a different approach to treat cardiovascular disease. Stem cell therapy or using stem cells to stimulate and direct tissue growth is a major focus of regenerative medicine. However, they don't tend to survive very well if you just directly inject them into the body. So we have to find a way to protect these cells. And we begin by exploring cell encapsulation techniques for cardiovascular disease. And one type of treatment involves delivering stem cells that will stimulate the regrowth of blood vessels in that area of the heart. So in our group using a technology known as microfluidics, we've developed a platform that can trap only a few cells into these very small and uniform bubbles, about 50 microns in size, that will allow us to deliver the cells directly to the heart muscle. I mean the most exciting thing is we see that the cells in culture, they seem to be very happy when they're just one or two cells in these capsules. So it looks like we may have a much more effective therapy potentially if we can actually produce these in high groupode. For many of the scientists here at Johns Hopkins, institutions like the INBT are not only useful, but instrumental to providing answers to these medical problems. I think by nature research has to be interdisciplinary and at least in medicine. I don't think that any one group really has a broad enough breadth of knowledge in order to really solve these problems. So all of this will require the collaboration among scientists, engineers and clinicians. And in many cases, even a marketing perspective, if one wants to think about eventually translate and this to apply this to a clinical setting to benefit patients, a population population, someone has to make this into a product. So with such a complex task, it is very helpful to have institutions like INBT to put different resources together. Not only just from the training perspective, from a scientific team-managing perspective, but at least get people with different set of agenda or expertise and different set of thinking to come together to solve a common problem. That is the only approach that I personally view will make it successful. | ↗ |