Regenerative medicine researchers are developing ways to help assist the body’s natural healing process. To help heal overwhelming tissue injuries, scientists want to provide stem cells to make new cells, blood vessels and growth factors to help them grow, and scaffolds to support them while they re-create the extracellular matrix (ECM). The ECM is the part of your tissues that cells grow on and interact with.

Just as a scaffold holds up a building while it’s being constructed, scaffolds in regenerative medicine provide a base for new stem cells to grow to become new bone, skin, or muscle tissue. Scaffolds also give the blood vessels something to hang onto while they grow to fill the gap caused by an injury.

After the building is complete, the scaffold is no longer needed. Similarly, after stem cells create the new ECM, the artificial scaffold will degrade.

Properties of Scaffolds

- Scaffolds should be as flexible and elastic as the tissue itself. For example, scaffolds for bone will be harder than scaffolds for skin. The texture of the scaffold is very important; it must mimic the part of the body it is meant to regenerate.

- Scaffolds need to be biodegradable. A common example is that certain stitches (which are a scaffold for skin to grow back on) are absorbed back into the skin when the wound has healed.

We’ve saved one of the most amazing stories until now.
Scientists took a rat’s heart and stripped it of all the cells, leaving only the extracellular matrix. Then they took stem cells that they had grown in the lab, in little Petri dishes, and put them back in the heart.
And what do you think it did? (Hint: Have you ever read “The Telltale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe?) The stem cells differentiated into fully developed heart cells and started to beat! (How does the heart beat?)
This development is very exciting, as it offers promise for new treatments for heart disease.
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