In The Guardian:
A frog has regrown a lost leg after being treated with a cocktail of drugs in a significant advance for regenerative medicine.
The African clawed frog, which is naturally unable to regenerate its limbs, was treated with the drugs for just 24 hours and this prompted an 18-month period of regrowth of a functional leg. The demonstration raises the prospect that in the future drugs could be used to switch on similar untapped abilities for regeneration in human patients to restore tissues or organs lost to disease or injury.
“It’s exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an almost complete limb,” said Nirosha Murugan of Tufts University in Massachusetts and first author of the paper. “The fact that it required only a brief exposure to the drugs to set in motion a months-long regeneration process suggests that frogs and perhaps other animals may have dormant regenerative capabilities that can be triggered into action.”
2 comments:
I'm actually quite surprised that a drug could work for this. In the past there was some progress with electrical treatment to provide the energy for cell-division. One suspects that there would have to be more going on than a drug alone.
The combination of intrinsic signalling molecules is very interesting(full study available at link). BDNF!? That's strange but probably necessary for the nerve regeneration but AFAIK it doesn't regenerate axons. It's a very complicated set up and the species can regenerate in the tadpole stage so I'm not excited about the translational possibilities.
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