How was born again
The human body is an amazing and in many ways a miracle that has not yet been solved. It has many amazing abilities, but despite millions of years of evolution, during which the most complex mechanisms of survival appeared and developed to perfection, our body has not managed to learn how to completely heal skin damage from wounds and burns.
A group of scientists from the medical school. Perelman at the University of Pennsylvania states that they have finally succeeded in accomplishing the impossible - to develop a method that ensures complete skin regeneration using fat cells.
Adipocytes - cells of adipose tissue, which are formed if there are shallow cuts on the body, fill the damaged area, ensuring joint harmonious development with other cells as the tissues heal. Scar tissue. consisting of completely different cells, myofibroblasts, which are formed after serious damage to the skin, looks completely different, since it does not contain fat cells or hair follicles.
Maxim Plikus, an associate professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and Cell Biology at the University of California, Irvine, study leader, said the findings provide an excellent opportunity to control the wound healing process by causing tissue to regenerate instead of scarring.
George Cotsarelis, head of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, explains: “The secret is to rebuild hair follicles first. After that, fat cells will be produced in response to the signal from the follicles."
Opening perspectives
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Scientists needed to figure out where the signals were coming from. As a result, a factor was identified that promotes the transformation of myofibroblasts into adipose tissue cells - bone morphogenetic protein. Researcher Professor Kotsarelis states: “It used to be thought that myofibroblasts were unable to transform into other types of cells. But research has shown that we have the ability to influence the functioning of these cells, and that they are able to efficiently and stably convert into adipocytes."
The results of the study are undoubtedly amazing, but it should not be forgotten that the experiments have just begun and so far only serve as a confirmation of the concept.
To date, the effect of the regeneration mechanism has been confirmed by tests on laboratory rodents and on artificially grown samples of human skin. Clinical trials may be less successful, and in any case, no one knows how the cells of hair follicles, implanted into wounds on the skin of a living person, will behave. But if the experiments are successful, humanity (especially its beautiful half) will be able to forget about scars forever and stop worrying about any traces of skin damage. Scientists and geneticists have a long and painstaking work to find answers to many questions before new methods are introduced into everyday medical cosmetic practice.
The obvious application of this discovery is to repair damaged skin without scarring or scarring. But we should not forget that many diseases are accompanied by the depletion of adipose tissue, including HIV infection, and it is not yet clear whether scientists will be able to cope with this task in the near future. It is also known that the appearance of wrinkles occurs as a result of a decrease in the volume of subcutaneous fat. Therefore, these research results will open up incredible opportunities in the field of studying the mechanisms of aging and solving a variety of cosmetic problems.
Nadezhda Prokopenko