Regenerating Human Body Parts...Is it Possible?

Last Thursday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced the launch of AFIRM. AFIRM, or the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, is described as follows:

“A five-year, Army-led cooperative effort to leverage cutting –edge medical technology to develop new ways to assist servicemembers who’ve suffered severe, disfiguring wounds during their wartime service…A key component of the initiative is to harness stem cell research and technology in finding innovative ways to use a patient’s natural cellular structure to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses, and fingers” (Gilmore).

Essentially, medical technicians are currently developing methods of “regrowing” tissue from a patient’s stem cells, with the ultimate goal of putting this tissue back into the body of that same patient. This eliminates the possibility of the body rejecting the tissue. “Special techniques are being developed to employ regrown tissue in the fabrication of new muscles and tendons…or for the repair/replacement of damaged or missing extremities such as noses, ears, and fingers” (Gilmore).

AFIRM will be a massive joint project between the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command (Fort Detrick, MD), the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research (San Antonio, TX), Rutgers University (NJ), Wake Forest University (NC) and the University of Pittsburgh (PA). The budget for this project for the first five years is $250 million, provided by the Department of Defense, the VA, and the National Institutes of Health, among other public and private donors.

Over 900 soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq alone have had amputations as a result of war injuries.

Want to learn more? Read Gilmore’s full article here, or the press release about AFIRM here.

What do you think? Salamanders can regrow body parts…Do you think the same is truly possible for human beings as well? How successful do you think AFIRM will be?