What is it?

Regeneration is the ability of the body to regrow tissue when it is lost by trauma, disease, or other misadventure. The most famous example of this is the salamander, which can reproduce whole arms, legs, tails, and other body parts within days following their amputation.
Salamanders are, however, not the only creatures with such powers - humans have them naturally as well (at least for a time) while developing in the womb. If a developing baby loses a finger or another of its extremities, it simply grows it back without forming scar tissue.
Indeed, very young neonatal babies can sometimes do the same if injured shortly after being born. Even in adults, kidneys and livers retain some of this regenerative capacity when they are damaged.

How does it work?

The Science & Technology

Foregen was brought into existence by its founders’ desire to harness regenerative medicine’s amazing advances over the last twenty years. Under certain circumstances, tissue engineering techniques can now restore original tissue to those who have lost it.
This 90-second video by Lyrical Science offers an explanation in layman’s terms of the process of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine - for a more complete review on the science of regeneration, follow the links that are embedded throughout this page.

So what has regenerative medicine accomplished so far?

Regenerative medicine has accomplished feats unimaginable just a decade ago. Such scientific progress demonstrates that Foregen’s mission to regenerate foreskins and reverse circumcision is possible. In fact, Foregen has made tangible progress towards foreskin regeneration.

Why is tissue regeneration more limited in humans?

While we don’t know fully why we cannot regenerate after birth, existing theories may shed some light on the issue.
One theory is that stopping the regenerative process is critical to allow a much more powerful survival aid to take its place: scarring. A scar allows a wound to seal quickly, thus preventing death from infection or loss of blood. In evolutionary terms, the ability to scar helped our ancestors survive. Put simply, for primitive man there was  little benefit in having a body that regenerated an amputated arm (which  takes months) if, in the meantime, he bled to death. Survival by  scarring was, therefore, a critical step forward in evolutionary terms,  not just for man but for all mammals. Scarring is not without costs, however. First, scar tissue inhibits any new regrowth by regeneration; and secondly, scar tissue is inherently different from the normal tissue that once was there (as anyone with a scar will know), both in appearance and in function. It stops us from dying when wounded, but is useful for little else functionally.

In that case, how is it possible to regenerate now that we are adults?

That is the question to which biomedical research has devoted itself for many years. Fortunately, we now have some answers. The first is the discovery that the unique DNA structure present in every cell represents (among other things) a blueprint or map of our wholebody, not just information relevant to that cell.  

This blueprint organizes the body’s growth in the womb by telling cells what comes next in the  growth process. This body map is created in the very first cell we have  and remains constant throughout our lives, unaltered even if our body becomes wounded, damaged, or amputated in some way. As such, when we are wounded, our body still has a record of what should have been there, a record that regenerative medicine uses to have the body remake itself. The second key is learning how to stop scarring from happening. When we are wounded, our body automatically instructs the cells at the wound  site to form scar tissue. As stated above, this function was of importance to evolution but marked the end of natural regeneration in  our body.

Regenerative medical techniques have shown that it is possible  to turn off that instruction from the brain and instead send a new instruction to wound site cells toregrowwhat was taken away, using the blueprint present in our DNA, just as if the body were still in the womb.

How do we induce regeneration from our DNA?

There are two critical elements in regeneration: stem cells and  the extra-cellular matrix or ECM. Of course, you may have heard of stem cells. Traditionally, stem cells were derived from aborted fetuses, which is why so much controversy surrounded them. Recently, scientists discovered asimplemethod to revert adult skin cells back to embryonic stem cells.  
This is a feat that cannot be overstated. The less familiar term, the extra-cellular matrix, is also a necessary component for regenerating  tissues. The ECM can be thought of as the skeleton for a tissue. It provides an attachment point for cells and gives structures their  three-dimensionality. It also facilitates cell-to-cell communication and  stem cell differentiation as well as providing the necessary vascularity to nourish cells and remove waste. When implanted correctly in the human body, the ECM prompts the surrounding cells to repair the tissue instead of creating inflammation and scar tissue. The ECM can be obtained by stripping the cells of a donated tissue, like in our research, or in the future, potentially via bioprinting. To read more about the current progress of bioprinting, click here. The standard practice in regenerating a tissue is to obtain the ECM of the tissue you wish to regenerate and then seed it with the appropriate layers of cells.

The experiment is confined within an environment that mimics that of the human body until the cells populate the entire structure. Each particular tissue has specific needs in terms of cells and growing environment, but this general model has proven successful in other work previously in the field of tissue engineering.