Regeneration Award
Save regenerative cells
<url>The Moscow government has awarded annual prizes to young scientists.
Among the laureates was Anastasia Efimenko, Candidate of Medical Sciences, Senior researcher at the Research Laboratory of Gene and Cell Technologies of the Faculty of Fundamental Medicine of Lomonosov Moscow State University.
The topic of her work: "The influence of risk factors on human stem and progenitor cells and the processes of repair and regeneration in the body." We publish an interview with a scientist.
– Please tell us about your research. What problems will it help solve?
– For quite a long time, a paradigm based on traditional approaches to therapy and surgery prevailed in our medicine. Pharmacological preparations, treatment methods and surgical techniques were rapidly improved. But in the last two decades, a fundamentally new, completely innovative field has been formed – regenerative medicine, aimed at fully restoring the structure and function of damaged tissues and organs.
– So, relatively speaking, there will be no more scars on the body?
– Scar formation is a compensatory reaction of the body. Regenerative medicine aims to leave this term in the past, its task is to achieve the growth of a completely new full–fledged skin on the damaged area. In our conversation, the skin is just an example. We are talking about whole organs and parts of the human body. Take, for example, the liver. Today, in case of its severe damage or removal, certain functions of this organ can be replaced or corrected with some drugs. And tomorrow it will be possible to create a completely new functional organ in its place. This is especially true for military medicine, disaster medicine, various degenerative diseases, all kinds of malformations, when some organs are simply missing at the time of a person's birth.
– It sounds somewhat fantastic…
– This is only at first glance. One of the areas that is actively developing within the framework of regenerative medicine is cell therapy. That is, the use of not chemicals or individual molecules, but whole living cells isolated from human tissues. First of all, we are talking about stem cells, which are designed to start working in case of tissue damage, recreating it anew and replacing the lost areas. In an adult, stem cells in most tissues are extremely small, and they are often not enough to restore the functionality of damaged tissues and entire organs. And the task of regenerative medicine is either to stimulate one's own stem cells in tissues, or to increase a sufficient number of stem cells in the laboratory and use them to create new organs and tissues for subsequent transplantation to the patient.
Today, such technologies already exist, they are being developed by a huge number of research groups and commercial companies. The fact is that stem cells are the basis for the formation of all tissues of our body from the earliest stage of the origin of life. But from the biomaterial of donors, we mainly isolate progenitor cells of specialized cells - progenitor cells. They are able to activate under the influence of various stimuli, give rise to new specialized cells to replace the lost ones and regulate regeneration processes, restoring the structure and functions of damaged tissues and organs. They are already "educated" and predisposed towards becoming one or another type of cell, but they are not yet.
– So what problem is your project aimed at solving?
– A person does not live in ideal conditions. He is affected by external factors, he gets sick, gets old. All this has an effect on stem cells and progenitor cells. My work is devoted to the study of the influence of these risk factors on the properties of stem and progenitor cells of an adult organism, as well as to the identification of targets for correcting the functioning of these cells associated with aging and chronic diseases.
– How important is the difference between own and donor cells here?
– Cell therapy uses both sources of cells: both own (autologous) human cells and donor cells (allogeneic). So far, the fundamental advantages of one of these approaches over the other have not been proven. But when we use donor cells, we immediately encounter problems that are characteristic of any transplantology – immunological rejection, increased risk of infection transfer, donor selection system, ethical considerations. If you use your own cells, then many of these problems disappear by definition. But another difficulty arises: the patient's own cells at the age of having, as a rule, a number of chronic diseases do not give the effect that has been demonstrated in experimental studies. And this is the reason for the insufficient effectiveness of many cell therapy approaches in clinical trials, when the result is not as expected as expected. It is unnecessary to explain what the price of such mistakes is.
The task of my work is to identify the most effective approaches to preventing or correcting the negative impact of risk factors on the therapeutic properties of regenerative cells. At the same time, I paid special attention to both the use of general stimulating methods of influencing cells, and the search for targets for point correction.
– What regenerative medicine already knows.
– Today there are already certain achievements that have found their application in the clinic, there are several registered foreign drugs based on stem and progenitor cells – for the regeneration of bone and cartilage tissue, restoration of skin. Impressive clinical results were achieved when using the patient's own cells to recreate hollow organs, for example, the trachea, bladder, urethra and some others. A significant number of positive results have been obtained in the field of stimulation of blood vessel growth and neurogenesis using regenerative medicine methods, which is especially important for the treatment of ischemic and neurodegenerative diseases. I am now talking mainly about the successes of foreign colleagues, but similar work is being carried out in our country. Many cellular drugs are at different stages of preclinical and clinical trials. I'll make a reservation right away: there are no clear recipes or technologies here. This is a relatively young, but very actively developing science. Great hopes are pinned on it, and we cannot allow a situation in which practice will significantly outstrip theory.
– How did you get into science?
– Probably, the first attempts to find oneself in research were made back in school years. I was very lucky with the teachers, I studied at the University Lyceum in Petrozavodsk, where research activities were stimulated and encouraged in every possible way. Later, she spoke at various scientific conferences, seminars, participated in the "Step into the Future" program. And the foundations of the scientific worldview were laid just then. And since I was interested in how a person is arranged since childhood, I entered the Moscow University at the Faculty of Fundamental Medicine, where one of the basic principles is to engage future doctors in research work.
It is important to note that if we are not talking about applied developments, but about fundamental science, which, among other things, studies the mechanisms of the same regeneration, but does not give any practical way out, although no fundamentally new treatment method can be developed without its results, then this science is not in our honor… And it is certainly not funded enough. Only the state can finance it. Any business, any funds are focused on practical results. Moreover, they need guarantees, and fundamental science cannot give guarantees, at least for the simple reason that it does not know how it works, it studies it. Therefore, systematic state support for such research should be built. Preferably without unbearable bureaucracy and accountability, which can ruin any endeavor. On the other hand, in our country it is necessary to develop much more actively mechanisms for the implementation of concrete results of fundamental research into practice, and these methods should be widely available to young researchers thinking about commercializing their scientific developments.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru04.03.2015