Have you ever taken into consideration a relationship between growing a new limb and pig's intestine cells?
Well, you may start doing it now, because science surprises us again with a discovery that will change medicine and healing procedures for ever.
It all started when Dr. Stephen Badylak tried to replace a dog's aorta with a piece of its own intestine. Thinking that the dog would not survive, Dr. Badylak kept "Rocky", the dog, in observation for a day. To his surprise, with just one day of recovery, Rocky was eating breakfast and wagging his tail, as usual.
But, how did it happen?
After some extra research, Dr. Badylak realized that the intestine cells worked as a magneto for stem cells which served the purpose of regenerating lost tissue. The interesting thing is that it also regenerated skeletal muscle, tissue that was believed to be unrecoverable.
After this extraordinary breakthrough, scientists realized that many tissues, and even tissue from other species, can be used in the regeneration of organs and limbs. That is how pigs were considered and tested to be part of this experiment, which from that point on would not involve animals anymore.
This is how, Isaias Hernandez, a marine that was injured in Iraq, and lost more that 50 percent of the muscles in his right leg, volunteered to try this new procedure on humans. Now the same marine, is running and playing sports to get fit enough to re-join the Marines.
