‘Scaffolds’ Regenerate Bones, Stop Aging
Illustrations for BODY / SPACE / FRAME by artist Antony Gormley and research engineer Sean Hanna via 3T RPD Ltd
Implantable organ and tissue “scaffolds” are currently in the spotlight for regenerative medicine, and may allow for the replacement of most body parts that flounder with age within 30-50 years, according to a report from BBC.
That means future centenarians born today could have a “physical” age of 50 at a calendar age of 100.
A “scaffolding” technique developed at Leeds University allows for transplantable tissues, and eventually organs, that the body can make its own. Once the scaffold has been transplanted, the body takes over and repopulates it with cells without any fear of rejection—the main reason why normal transplants wear out and fail.
Using this technique, a research team at Leeds has managed to make fully functioning heart valves, which involves taking a healthy donor heart valve—from a human or a suitable animal, such as a pig—and gently stripping away its cells using a cocktail of enzymes and detergents. The inert scaffold left can be transplanted into the patient, writes the BBC. According to Eileen Ingha, a professor at the university’s Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, trials in animals and on 40 patients in Brazil have shown promising results.
Across the continent, another approach to scaffolding is underway at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. There, professor Meital Zilberman has developed an artificial biologically active scaffold made from soluble fibers, which may help humans replace lost or missing bone.
via BBC
In a conversation with Sputnik Observatory, biologist Donald Ingber explains that our cells and proteins within the body are scaffold-based.
About five years ago, people began to discover that there is a cytoskeleton in bacteria and actually bacteria are not filled with floating little enzymes. They’re about as dense as a catalytic converter. It’s like the mitochondria in our cells people think came from primordial bacteria that essentially inhabited the first cells – like two cells coming together to join to create a more complex cell.
So in my work on the origin of life, I started at the atom, and I go up to molecules being synthesized off of clay, and these molecules folding up like tensegrity and having some shape stability and grouping together and forming complexes. And some key ideas that are involved in this are that when you form a complex over time, if you had enough stability in the complex, you might evolve complexes that can produce themselves and you have replicated complexes of proteins. It’s not so bizarre because there are proteins, like prions, which cause brain diseases. Essentially, they’re proteins that replicate by inducing shape changes in other proteins. This is like mad cow disease, prion disease. In any case, once you get scaffolds that have certain functionalities, in millions of years and you might have lots of different functionalities and they may come together and form more complex structures. But what came out of this discussion, and referring to the literature about what people have actually seen, began to describe the emergence of the first cells which essentially would, based on this paradigm, would start with structures that can maybe use RNA to make their own scaffolds and maybe, over time, convert into proteins that can make their own protein so that you have protein-synthesis scaffolds. And then, on top of that, you would then emerge structures that replicate: can induce, synthesize nucleic acids, like other RNAs or DNAs. Essentially, when you look at the literature and you look at how bacteria are structured, they have machineries that essentially match very much the idea of sort of coupling the DNA synthesis machinery and the protein-synthesis machinery and the cortical membrane of the cell, actually using scaffolds. It’s all scaffold-based. It’s almost the solid structural system, that structure and catalyst as one. The idea of tensegrity hasn’t been explored in a great way, but it’s certainly a system that has different sorts of cytoskeletal elements and is undoubtedly prestressed because it only has attractive forces between the different elements.