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Hi, my name is Luis Garza.
I'm a dermatologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and
I study regenerative medicine.
So, what is regenerative?
Well, lets go to the toy box.
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It turns out that we have a set of instructions in every single cell of
our body.
And those instructions were executed when we were in the womb of
our mother, to build every single organ in our body.
And because those instructions are maintained in all the cells that we
have as adults, there's the exciting possibility of reactivating those
instructions so that we can rebuild organs in adults.
And that's the promise of regenerative medicine, and
that's why we're so excited about it.
So, today we're gonna use some toys.
This is the all terrain defense pod.
And we also have the imperial shuttle.
And these are magnificent,
beautiful creations from the Star Wars universe that
are really a good demonstration of what a complicated machine can be.
And they're not that different from the human body.
After birth, our organs are intact and function well, but
during life insults happen and our organs suffer damage, and
there's chaos happens again.
And so the question is, can regenerative medicine allow for
us to kind of build order out of this chaos and
capitalize in the properties of stem sells to self- assemble?
All of our organs are intricate machines as well, and
damage can hurt them.
So, for example, a big one in my field in skin is burns.
So, let's say the all terrain defense pod can suffer some burns.
And that's gonna disassemble some of these very intricate parts,
and separate them into their sub-units.
Another example might be, for example in the liver.
So liver damage can occur, for example,
from viruses like hepatitis.
Or in the heart you can have a heart attack, and
during a heart attack you lose important muscle.
And so, all of these examples of damage result in disassembly.
So you have, in a lot of cases, the cells are still there but
they're not connected the way they used to be.
And that's exactly what's kind of happening here with this Lego,
is the Legohad very intricate, ordered parts.
But through damage, in this case my hands,
the Lego's becoming disordered.
And so the question is,
can regenerative medicine provide a solution for healing here?
Can the stem cells exhibit their normal properties of self assembly,
in service of recreating organs that have been lost?
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The idea is that your body's pretty good at plugging the hole after
an injury.
So after a burn, your body can seal the skin.
But it doesn't do a great job at recreating all the structures that
were there previously, and that's the definition of a scar.
And what my lab is interested in is looking at these concepts in
the skin.
So normally the skin, just like every other organ,
is a highly structured system that has multiple component parts that
act together to create something that's very valuable for all of us.
So, for example, here you can see that there are these regular
layers in the skin, for example, that represent the intact organ.
And not only are there important layers to the skin,
there's also a lot of important structures in the skin.
For example, like our sweat glands that help us
maintain our body temperature when we're working out.
Or also, for example,
hair follicles that help us sense our outside world.
The cool thing about these structures like hair follicles and
sweat glands is they end of being a nexus for multiple other organs.
Like nerves, for example,
are attracted to areas of hair follicles.
Stem cells, for
example melanocyte stem cells that provide our pigment in our skin.
The skin is a very highly ordered,
structured unit that provides a lot of important function for us.
But our lab is interested in asking, after injury what happens?
So lets say for, example, after a burn a lot of this order is now
changing into chaos and disorder.
And so you lose your structures like hair follicles and sweat glands.
The order of the different layers of skin now become completely
separated.
Now there's disorder and there's chaos.
And the exciting process is to ask,
how can we promote order again in the systems?
RNA is normally a single strand, but
we discovered that an important type of RNA, when they're together called
double-stranded RNA, can actually induce reordering after injury.
So after a large-scale injury, that double strand RNA helps the layers
become ordered again, such that now you have this regular repeating
array of the intricate parts.
And it also induced regeneration of structures like hair follicles.
And like we know, the hair follicles, again, are gonna be this
nexus that attracts blood vessels and nerves and stem cells.
Such that at the end, in the presence of double-stranded RNA,
we have enhanced regeneration.
We're really excited about using double-stranded RNA to promote
regeneration and prevent scarring in skin.
We wanna try and not only prevent scars, but treat them.
And we're hoping that our discoveries can be a springboard in
multiple organs, so we can induce regeneration, and
create order out of chaos after injury.
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So magically the machine is self assembled,
and we've created order out of chaos.
And that's the amazing power of stem cells in regenerative medicine.
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