Is There a Connection Between Aging and Regenerative Medicine?

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The ideal, utopian future for combating aging or neuro degeneration is take the right pills and let the body do it itself. That means preempr thinking about preemptive regenerative treatment even before an injury happens. From application sid offe, this is still a long path ahead, but from basic viology point of view, it's fascinating that it ties in to all these different processes. For instance, sugar obviously promotes dibedes, and wound healing is disrupted in dibetic state.

Biological organisms are pretty good at healing themselves, but their abilities fall short in crucial ways. Planaria can be cut into pieces, and each piece will regrow into an entire organism; but for most advanced animals, loss of a limb becomes a permanent condition. But why should that necessarily be so, if an organism’s genome knows what it’s supposed to look like? Lea Goentoro’s lab has recently produced surprising results that indicate that it’s easier than you might think to coax animals into regenerating limbs.

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Lea Goentoro received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Biology at Caltech. Her research involves how biological systems function and develop across a variety of scales, including perception, organization, and self-repair.

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