Your Fat May Help You Heal: Researcher Extracts Natural Scaffold for Tissue Growth

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) — It frequently happens in science that what you throw away turns out to be most valuable. It happened to Deepak Nagrath, but not for long

The Rice assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering was looking for ways to grow cells in a scaffold, and he discarded the sticky substance secreted by the cells.

"I thought it was contamination, so I threw the plates away," said Nagrath, then a research associate at Harvard Medical School.

That substance, derived from adipose cells -- aka body fat -- turned out to be a natural extracellular matrix, the very thing he was looking for.

Nagrath, who joined Rice in 2009, and his co-authors have since built a biological scaffold that allows cells to grow and mature. He hopes the new material, when suffused with stem cells, will someday be injected into the human body, where it can repair tissues of many types without fear of rejection.

The research by Nagrath and his co-authors appeared last week in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Journal.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100325143059.htm

[thecrow]

1. Id give up a little body fat if he can grow me a new knee!~