Let me share an ahhhh moment I experience last summer while taking a Victoria BC Whale Watching Tour.
I will not delve deeper into the wild undulating ride I experienced suitably dressed in an all-weather wetsuit with a quite pronounced mauvaise odeur de la journée smiling bravely for my grandson as we crashed to what seemed to be a never ending sea of waves.
But it quickly as we scrambled in the harbour are part stop the engines and a most welcome peace settled on our merry band. Within a few moments our young pilot with his fingers directed her attention with a certain sense of authority to the edge of some rocks protruding from the water to some wonderful starfish of assorted colours and of substantial size.
As this was a tourist sojourn cameras were at the ready and many pictures were taken. It was observed that several of them were short one arm. Our knowledgeable guide explained the missing appendage had been eaten by the fish. It seems I the fish understood the importance of sustainability and the need to preserve by so the just ate one arm and waited the starfish to go replacement. Like the circle life the starfish offers up another tentacle.
It’s amazing — need to understand sustainability — and collaborating with the fish enable the starfish to replicate the missing limb before will be attacked again. We dream of that reproduction capability and the blessing it would bring to many with amputated limbs or broken backs. It is reported there are over a quarter million amputees in Britain with 9000 having appendixes amputated as a direct result of diabetes.
The article below… Provides the thoughts that we may be on the cusp of repairing ourselves just as the lowly starfish. It appears researchers at the Allen discovery Centre in Massachusetts. USA are expressing excitement about the breakthrough — regrown legs on frogs!
Followed by another article on success with a patient who is paralyzed the waist down after a motorcycle accident enabled him to take his first steps in five years.
Again I thought it was worth a scan for those interested in this research.
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Frogs’ legs regrown in landmark experiment that could be first step for human limb regeneration
Scientists now wonder if other animals may have dormant regenerative capabilities – and want to try the process on mammals next
Scientists used African clawed frogs for their regeneration experiment, with this picture illustration some of the regrowth in the creature’s limb
Scientists have regrown the legs of frogs, helping the trailblazing amphibians to swim again, while giving hope to amputees that their limbs could one day be restored.
In a landmark experiment, researchers amputated the legs of African clawed frogs before encasing the stumps in a special silicone sleeve filled with a gel cocktail of five drugs for 24 hours.
It set in motion an 18-month period of regrowth which eventually led to the formation of almost complete and functional legs, with nearly normal bone structure and several toes.
The limbs moved and responded to touch and the frogs were able to make use of them for swimming through water, moving much like a normal frog, the scientists said.
How to regenerate an amputated frog leg
The team now wants to test the process on mammals, with a view to eventually moving to humans if successful.
“It’s exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an almost complete limb,” said Dr Nirosha Murugan, research affiliate at the Allen Discovery Center 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.”
There are believed to be around 250,000 amputees in Britain, with the NHS carrying out 9,000 amputations each year from diabetes alone.
Many creatures have the capability of regenerating some limbs, including salamanders, starfish, crabs, and lizards. Flatworms can even be cut up into pieces, with each piece reconstructing an entire organism.
Scar tissue prevents regeneration
Even humans can regenerate their livers to full size if up to half the organ is lost, but arms and legs are so structurally complex that they cannot be restored by any natural process of regeneration in humans or mammals.
Instead of regrowing limbs, a mound of scar tissue grows, preventing infection and blood loss but also preventing regeneration.
To halt this natural process, a special selection of drugs were chosen to damp down inflammation, inhibit the production of collagen that would lead to scarring and encourage the growth of nerves, blood vessels and muscles.
Animals that can regenerate limbs tend to live in water, which scientists suspected was the key to preventing the scarring.
The stump was soaked in these chemicals inside a special Biodome which mimicked conditions inside an amniotic-sac which holds a foetus during pregnancy. It stopped the wound healing over and instead triggered a regeneration process, similar to what happens within an embryo.
In fact, within the first few days after treatment, the team saw the same molecular pathways springing to life that are seen in a developing foetus. This activation meant that the process needed no more input from the scientists, with the limb getting on with organising the tissue itself.
Biodome mimics amniotic-like environment
“Mammals and other regenerating animals will usually have their injuries exposed to air or making contact with the ground, and they can take days to weeks to close up with scar tissue,” added David Kaplan, professor of engineering at Tufts University and co-author of the study.
“Using the Biodome cap in the first 24 hours helps mimic an amniotic-like environment which, along with the right drugs, allows the rebuilding process to proceed without the interference of scar tissue.”
Scientists said the experiment represents a significant milestone toward the restoration of fully functional frog limbs and suggests different drug and growth factor combinations could lead to limbs that are even more functionally complete, with normal digits, webbing, and more detailed skeletal and muscular features.
“We’ll be testing how this treatment could apply to mammals next,” said corresponding author Michael Levin, director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, and associate faculty member of the Wyss Institute.
“Covering the open wound with a liquid environment under the Biodome, with the right drug cocktail, could provide the necessary first signals to set the regenerative process in motion,” he said.
“It’s a strategy focused on triggering dormant, inherent anatomical patterning programs, not micromanaging complex growth, since adult animals still have the information needed to make their body structures.”
The research was published in the Journal Science Advances.
Activity-dependent spinal cord neuromodulation rapidly restores trunk and leg motor functions after complete paralysis
(Michel Roccati who was paralysed from waist down after motorcycle accident takes his first steps in five years)
Excerpt:…
They then use artificial intelligence to discover the sequence of neurons which fire in individuals when they want to carry out various activities, such as walking, cycling and even canoeing.
At the moment, the implant uses just 16 electrodes to stimulate the nerves, but in time, the researchers want to move to 32 or 64 to gain even greater control.
After the implant, patients need about 10 days of recovery, before the implant can be switched on. As well as Mr Roccati, it has been also trialled successfully on three other patients.
Prof Gregoire Courtine, a neuroscientist from EPFL, said: “Our stimulation algorithms are based on imitating nature, and work exactly in the way that the spinal cord is stimulated by the brain.
“When you first turn it on you can stand, and step but you still need support, and the gait pattern is poor, but it allows you to start training all this activity immediately, and over the course of several months we can decrease the support.
“All three patients were able to stand, walk, pedal, swim and control their torso movements in just one day, after their implants were activated. That’s thanks to the specific stimulation programs we wrote for each type of activity.
“We are not yet at the stage where it’s a commercially available technology that you can use with your smartphone, but that’s our next objective.”
…. In 2018, Swiss researchers Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch made headlines with an implant they devised that sends electrical pulses to the spinal cord of paralyzed patients. The stimulation of the spinal nerves triggers plasticity in the cells, which seems to regenerate nerve connections, allowing test subjects paralyzed from the waist down to stand and walk, something that doctors told them they were unlikely to do again in their lifetimes. Now, the same team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and Lausanne University Hospital have showcased an upgraded version of this spinal cord electrical stimulation — and the improvements speak for themselves.
The personalized spinal cord electrode implants were shown to restore motor movements within a few hours of the therapy’s onset in three paralyzed patients. The volunteers could not only stand and walk, but also perform motor movements that are an order of magnitude more complex, such as cycling, swimming, and canoeing.
“Within a couple of hours, our therapy restored independent walking within a few hours after the onset of the therapy; in addition to many additional motor activities that are critical for rehabilitation and daily life,” said Robin Demesmaeker, a researcher at EPFL and the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University Hospital Lausanne, told ZME Science.
“Central to this remarkably more effective and ultrafast therapeutic efficacy was a series of disruptive technological innovations driven by our understanding of the mechanisms through which electrical spinal cord stimulation restores movement after paralysis,” add Demesmaeker, who is also the first author of the new study that appeared today in the journal Nature Medicine.
