Leapin’ Lizards – Salamander Could Help with Human Regeneration

posted on Dec 09 by Stacy in the Disability News, Health, Paralysis Cures, Spinal Cord Injury category

A team of researchers connected with the University of Florida McKnight Brain Institute’s Regeneration Project has been awarded a coveted National Institutes of Health Grand Opportunity Grant of $2.4 million to prepare tools to compare the amazing regenerative powers of the Mexican axolotl salamander with established mouse models currently used to study human disease and injury.

Creating a new model of study based on this salamander and comparing it with other study models could pave the way for totally new methods of looking at human regeneration in cases of spinal cord injury and nerve cell damage. While humans can regenerate cells to replace a lost fingertip and even replace half a liver, we can’t replace entire limbs or organs once they’re lost to injury or disease.

But the axolotl salamander can regrow entire limbs and even portions of its central nervous system. These salamanders and humans share many of the same biological systems and even 90% of the same genes, but the salamanders’ ability to regenerate after major injury makes them an exciting model to study and compare with existing models. The mechanism by which organs and cells are regenerated was deemed to be among the most important 25 questions scientists should explore, according to Science Magazine, as far back as 2005, but science itself had to catch up with dawn of the 21st century in order to explore this model of investigation into the important issue of how humans can restore and regenerate even as it’s able to add years to our lifespans.

So why is the salamander able to regenerate so fully and well, and humans aren’t? That’s the purpose of this method of inquiry and further studies, to find that out and apply the results to humans. According to Edward Scott, Ph.D., principal investigator for the GO grant and director of the McKnight Brain Institute’s Program in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, “Ultimately, what makes the axolotl a great model for regeneration is that the model systems we are most familiar with — mice and humans — do not regenerate very well. By comparing how a mammal and a salamander respond to injuries, we can identify genes or proteins that we can now add back to the mammalian system to make it regenerate better.”