How we could teach our bodies to heal faster Kaitlyn Sadtler
What if you could take a pill or a vaccine
and, just like getting over a cold,
you could heal your wounds faster?
Today, if we have
an operation or an accident,
we’re in the hospital for weeks,
and often left with scars
and painful side effects
of our inability to regenerate
or regrow healthy, uninjured organs.
I work to create materials
that instruct our immune system to give us
the signals to grow new tissues.
Just like vaccines instruct
our body to fight disease,
we could instead instruct
our immune system
to build tissues
and more quickly heal wounds.
Now, regrowing body parts out of nowhere
might seem like magic,
but there are several organisms
that can achieve this feat.
Some lizards can regrow their tails,
the humble salamander
can completely regenerate their arm,
and even us mere humans
can regrow our liver
after losing more than half
of its original mass.
To make this magic
a bit closer to reality,
I’m investigating how our body
can heal wounds and build tissue
through instructions
from the immune system.
From a scrape on your knee
to that annoying sinus infection,
our immune system defends
our body from danger.
I’m an immunologist,
and by using what I know
about our body’s defense system,
I was able to identify key players
in our fight to build back
our cuts and bruises.
When looking at materials
that are currently being tested
for their abilities to help regrow muscle,
our team noticed that after treating
an injured muscle with these materials,
there was a large number of immune cells
in that material
and the surrounding muscle.
So in this case,
instead of the immune cells rushing off
towards infection to fight bacteria,
they’re rushing toward an injury.
I discovered a specific
type of immune cell,
the helper T cell,
was present inside
that material that I implanted
and absolutely critical for wound healing.
Now, just like when you were a kid
and you’d break your pencil
and try and tape it back together again,
we can heal,
but it might not be
in the most functional way,
and we’ll get a scar.
So if we don’t have these helper T cells,
instead of healthy muscle,
our muscle develops
fat cells inside of it,
and if there’s fat in our muscle,
it isn’t as strong.
Now, using our immune system,
our body could grow back
without these scars
and look like what it was
before we were even injured.
I’m working to create materials
that give us the signals
to build new tissue
by changing the immune response.
We know that any time
a material is implanted in our body,
the immune system will respond to it.
This ranges from pacemakers
to insulin pumps
to the materials that engineers are using
to try and build new tissue.
So when I place that material,
or scaffold, in the body,
the immune system creates
a small environment of cells and proteins
that can change the way
that our stem cells behave.
Now, just like the weather
affects our daily activities,
like going for a run
or staying inside and binge-watching
an entire TV show on Netflix,
the immune environment of a scaffold
affects the way that
our stem cells grow and develop.
If we have the wrong signals,
say the Netflix signals,
we get fat cells instead of muscle.
These scaffolds are made
of a variety of different things,
from plastics to naturally
derived materials,
nanofibers of varying thicknesses,
sponges that are more or less porous,
gels of different stiffnesses.
And researchers
can even make the materials
release different signals over time.
So in other words, we can orchestrate
this Broadway show of cells
by giving them the correct
stage, cues and props
that can be changed for different tissues,
just like a producer would change the set
for “Les Mis” versus
“Little Shop of Horrors.”
I’m combining specific types of signals
that mimic how our body responds to injury
to help us regenerate.
In the future, we could see
a scar-proof band-aid,
a moldable muscle filler
or even a wound-healing vaccine.
Now, we aren’t going to wake up tomorrow
and be able to heal like Wolverine.
Probably not next Tuesday, either.
But with these advances,
and working with our immune system
to help build tissue and heal wounds,
we could begin seeing
products on the market
that work with our body’s defense system
to help us regenerate,
and maybe one day be able
to keep pace with a salamander.
Thank you.
(Applause)