New Bone Treatment Technology Awesome, Still Experimental

Just a quickie heads-up on some super-cool news from the research world.  Soon, those bones that you keep insisting on breaking will be able to heal much more quickly.

It’s pretty much modern day science fiction, which, of course = AWESOME.  Right now it’s just in the very experimental phase, which means they’re just doing it with mice, but still, it’s pretty impressive.

What they’re doing is basically using a similar mechanism that earthworms use to regenerate, but adapting it to work with mammals.  It involves using a particular funky protein that, when in high doses in the injured area, increased the amount of healing activity significantly… like 3-4 times more.

The guess is, those proteins are stimulating stem cells in the bone to multiply and differentiate (specialize from raw stem cells into actual bone cells).  The hope, obviously, is that this technique can be modified for use in humans.

The implications are pretty huge.  Not only are we talking about faster fracture healing times, but there could be a potential osteoporosis treatment in there somewhere as well.  And, it’s likely that the same procedure could be adapted for other tissue types, like skin (think of the uses for burn victims!).

Cool stuff, my friends.  Now let’s just hope they can make it affordable!