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'Pixie Dust' Used to Regrow Severed Fingers

Posted on: Thursday, 1 May 2008, 15:30 CDT

Sixty-nine-year-old hobby shop worker Lee Spievak is a symbol of hope for some medical scientists who believe that human tissue can re-grow itself.

When Mr. Spievak severed half an inch of his finger off, doctors said he’d lost it for good.

Today, however, Spievak boasts of his completely re-grown finger – nerves, skin, nails and fingerprint – it’s all there.

But, he didn’t receive a transplant. Mr. Spievak used a powder, given to him by his brother Alan, who worked in the field of regenerative medicine.

The powder, or “pixie dust” as he refers to it, was developed by Dr. Stephen Badylak in a lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

Badylak creates the tissue through a process that takes cells from the lining of a pig’s bladder, leaving the remaining cell-free tissue.

The tissue is then dried and turned into sheets or powder.

"There are all sorts of signals in the body," explains Dr Badylak.

"We have got signals that are good for forming scar, and others that are good for regenerating tissues.”

"One way to think about these matrices is that we have taken out many of the stimuli for scar tissue formation and left those signals that were always there anyway for constructive remodeling."

Spievak said he put some of Dr Badylak’s powder on his injured finger for about 10 days.

"The second time I put it on I already could see growth . Each day it was up further,” Spievak said. “Finally it closed up and was a finger”

"It took about four weeks before it was sealed."

Researchers hope to one day use similar techniques to stimulate cells to re-grow skin of burn victims like Robert Henline, an Iraq war veteran who was almost killed in an explosion.

Henline suffered 35% burns to his head and upper body. His ears are almost totally gone, the skin on his head has been burnt to the bone.

So far he has undergone surgery 25 times, and he assumes he has got another 30 to go.

Henline said he hopes that doctors could develop a way to heal his wounds through matrices like those being produced by Dr. Badylak.

"Life changing! I think I'm more scared of hospitals than I am of going back to Iraq again."

Doctors plan to soon begin a clinical trial in Buenos Aires on a woman with cancer of the esophagus.

In the trial they will place the extra cellular matrix inside the body from where the portion of oesophagus has been removed, and hope to stimulate the cells around it to re-grow the missing portion.

"I think that within ten years that we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones, and promote the growth of functional tissue around those bones. And that is a major step towards eventually doing the entire limb," said Dr Badylak.

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On the Net:

Watch The Video: The man who grew a finger

Watch The Video: How it works in detail

University of Pittsburgh

Source: redOrbit Staff and Wire Reports

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