Regenerative Medicine: Changing What's Possible in Regenerative Healing
Regenerative Medicine has the promise of creating new living tissues to repair body parts damaged by injury or disease. It works by using drugs to encourage the bodies own innate healing power, but can also make use of stem cells or implanted devices to promote healing. The ultimate hope for this brand new field of Medicine is to reverse the life-altering effects of scarring, such as that which occurs after injury to the spinal cord, during a heart attack or following a brain stroke.
Rob Gourdie's laboratory in the Department of Regenerative Medicine focuses on regenerative healing of skin, heart and skeletal muscle. The lab is woking with clinical doctors at MUSC to make stem cell therapies work better and has developed a new drug from basic research with promise in regenerative healing. The drug has been licensed by a Charleston biotech company FirstString Research Inc and completed Phase 1 safety trials in human patients last year.