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This month Nature Medicine features a collection of articles focusing on regenerative medicine (pp 814880). Cover image: "My Life as a Hill" by Pamela Goode
Regenerative medicine may enable replacement of damaged or diseased tissues. But its clinical success will require deeper understanding of the basic biology of the stem cell niche and coordination between stem cell biologists and those in other fields.
Two years ago, Gyanendra Nath Singh was tasked with overseeing India's drug regulatory agency. Despite the US having temporarily suspended a suite of trials in India and banned drug imports from several manufacturers there over the last couple of years, Singh says progress is being made. Killugudi Jayaraman reports.
The pharmaceutical industry has recently taken steps to make clinical trial data more accessible. But for there to be meaningful transparency, governments—not drug companies—should set the terms of disclosure.
Restriction factors are host cell proteins that inhibit retroviral infection. A new study using mutants of human HIV-1 restriction factor SAMHD1 suggests that it inhibits infection through degradation of viral RNA rather than through its dNTPase activity as previously suggested.
Inflammatory diseases typically display circadian variation in symptom severity. A new study in mice shows how a pulmonary epithelial cell clock controls neutrophil recruitment to the lungs and provides insight into interactions between local and systemic circadian clocks.
Our understanding of stem cell biology is increasing, but the translation of this knowledge into regenerative medicine therapies for aged or diseased tissues is proving challenging. In this Perspective, four experts in the field discuss strategies for overcoming the major hurdles facing the translational regenerative field.
The search for cells that can regenerate lung tissue has been fueled by the need for improved clinical therapies for treatment of lung injury or degenerative lung diseases. Emerging techniques are allowing the identification of putative stem and progenitor cells in the lung and the understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating lung development and regeneration.
Tau pathology is identified in brains of individuals with Huntington's disease (HD), and reduction of tau expression can ameliorate disease in HD model mice.
In Alzheimer's disease, increased MAOB activity in reactive astrocytes leads to enhanced GABA release, and blockage of this pathway ameliorates memory dysfunction in mouse models.
Circulating tumor cells from patients with small-cell lung cancer can form tumors in mice, and their derived explants recapitulate the patients' response to chemotherapy.
Notch signaling is shown to regulate the browning of adipocytes and whole-body energy expenditure, with inhibition leading to protection from diet-induced obesity in mice.
Stanley Lemon and colleagues show that the HCV replicase is sensitive to lipid peroxidation, which may restrict viral replication in vitro and in vivo.
Feldman and colleagues describe a plasmonic gold chip for distinguishing type 1 from type 2 diabetes using ultralow volumes of serum and with comparable sensitivity to the current gold standard, radioimmunoassays.
High-throughput screening platform for the testing of small bioactive molecules that promote oligodendrocyte differentiation and remyelination: a new path to the discovery of potential drugs for multiple sclerosis.
Bioluminescence-based reporter system for monitoring nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) in live cells, which identifies a group of cardiac glycosides as potent inhibitors of NMD and intracellular calcium as a key regulator of NMD.
Research in regenerative medicine is advancing toward the goal of repairing damaged tissue and organs. Nature Medicine and Nature Biotechnology present a collection of reviews, features and commentaries that explore our current mechanistic understanding of stem cells, and the emerging technologies that will bring regenerative medicine to the clinic.
