Posts Tagged ‘Atala’
Regenerative medicine: Taking lessons from salamanders
Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 9:30 pmDr. Anthony Atala likes to start his talks with a time-lapse video of a salamander regrowing an injured limb over two weeks. Then, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine asks his listeners to imagine humans regenerating limbs, tissue or organs that have been damaged or are missing.
“Salamanders can regenerate. Why can’t we?,” Atala asked during a TEDMed talk last fall.
Dr. Anthony Atala
Actually, we can and we do, he responded Tuesday during a presentation at Research Triangle Park headquarters, where he had traveled from Winston-Salem to talk at the TARDC luncheon. “It’s real,” he said.
The human body replaces bones every 10 years, skin every two weeks and intestinal tissue every six days. Regenerative medicine taps into the body’s ability to regrow tissue, expands on it and speeds it up in the laboratory. Read more…
Regenerative medicine: Making spare parts for the body
Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 10:54 pmEfforts to grow skin, organs and blood vessels have advanced so fast so far that researchers who gathered Tuesday at the regenerative medicine forum in Winston-Salem paused before offering suggestions what they might accomplish in the next two decades.
Fashioned after conferences that have sprung up in the past few years across the U.S. and in Europe, the three-day forum brought together researchers, investors and policymakers interested in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering and stem cells. It was the first such event organized by Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which is headed by Dr. Anthony Atala, a urological surgeon who in 1999 was the first to implant a laboratory-grown organ into a patient.
The organ was a bladder. Now researchers are working on skin, blood vessels and entire livers. So, what’s next? How about a whole heart, or a kidney grown from a skin cell?
“I don’t think that’s science fiction,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, a biotech company near Boston. Read more…
From the mouths of innovators
Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 10:32 amA new speakers’ series is starting Sept. 15 at Research Triangle Park headquarters with Moritz Beckmann, chief executive of XinRay Systems.
The series, which is open to members of the Triangle Area Research Directors Council, or TARDC, taps executives from RTP area companies and leading university researchers who are advancing technology in various fields including medicine, drug development and diagnostics.
