Regenerating and rejuvenating human tissues

Children have an amazing capacity for healing after injury. Break a leg, the bone grows back; cut a finger, the skin heals. But as we age, most tissues no longer heal easily, and tissue loss is unavoidable due to aging, degenerative diseases such as arthritis, and cancer.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Fan Yang and host and fellow bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how biomaterials created in a lab can be injected into wound sites to enable tissue regeneration or rejuvenation by modulating stem cells, vasculature, or immune responses.

They also discuss the potential of exploiting such biomaterials to create 3D cancer models to facilitate discovery of novel drugs with reduced time and cost. 

Related: Fan Yang, professor of orthopaedic surgery and bioengineering.

Related: Russ Altman, the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, of genetics, of medicine (general medical discipline), of biomedical data science and, by courtesy, of computer science.