Tissue Engineering for Life

The human body is vulnerable to injuries—bone breaks, skin burns, and heart attacks, and regenerative medicine can help us heal faster by enhancing the ways that the body heals itself.

Get this movie at Green-Eye Visualization: http://tinyurl.com/3fts4vj

Take a tour of the bone and discover how old or injured bone tissue is constantly being replaced with new bone cells, a process that is called remodeling. These new cells come from the bone marrow, a veritable factory of adult stem cells.

But only some tissues in the body are so efficient at healing themselves! The heart is an organ that doesn't have a big regenerative capacity. This critical muscle circulates blood to carry oxygen and nutrients to the whole body. One of the biggest health threats today are heart attacks, which are caused by the accumulation of cholesterol in the blood vessels that feed the heart cells. If heart cells are not getting enough oxygen and nutrients, they can die and interrupt the rhythmic beating of the heart -- this is a heart attack. Doctors are studying ways of using adult stem cells found in the bone to help grow new tissue and heal the heart.

Produced by Regenerative Medicine Partnership in Education (www.sepa.duq.edu) and funded by a Science Education Partnership Award granted by the National Center for Research Resources, a component of the National Institutes of Health.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• biology
• education
• SEPA
• NIH
• NCRR
• regenerative medicine
• movies
• animation
• bone
• heart
• heart attacks
• cholesterol
• adult stem cells