Regenerating and rejuvenating human tissues

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A bioengineer discusses how biomaterials created in a lab can help the human body regenerate or rejuvenate tissues, or provide 3D disease models to inform drug discovery.

Children have an amazing capacity for healing after injury. Break a leg, the bone grows back; cut a finger, the skin heals. But as we age, most tissues no longer heal easily, and tissue loss is unavoidable due to aging, degenerative diseases such as arthritis, and cancer.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Fan Yang and host and fellow bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how biomaterials created in a lab can be injected into wound sites to enable tissue regeneration or rejuvenation by modulating stem cells, vasculature, or immune responses.

They also discuss the potential of exploiting such biomaterials to create 3D cancer models to facilitate discovery of novel drugs with reduced time and cost.