Cellular ‘glue’ can regenerate tissue and re-grow nerves

Synthetic molecules that adhere to cells have the potential to accelerate the field of regenerative medicine, moving towards building and repairing organs and tissues.

researchers in University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) They designed molecules that act like ‘cell glue’, allowing them to direct exactly how cells bind to each other.The discovery represents a major step towards building tissues and organs, a long-sought goal of regenerative medicine. [1].

Longevity. Technology: Glue molecules are naturally present throughout the body, holding trillions of cells together in highly organized patterns. They form structures, create neural circuits, and immune cells. to the target. Adhesion also facilitates cell-to-cell communication and keeps the body functioning as a whole in autoregulation.

new research published Naturedetails how researchers engineered cells containing customized adhesion molecules that bind to specific partner cells in predictable ways to form complex multicellular aggregates. .

“We were able to engineer the cells so that we could control which cells they interacted with and the nature of that interaction,” said senior author Dr. Wendell Lim. Director of Cell Design Institute at UCSF. “This opens the door for building new structures such as tissues and organs. [2]”

Regenerate connections between cells

Body tissues and organs begin to form intrauterine and continue to grow throughout childhood. By adulthood, many of the molecular instructions that guide these generative processes are lost, and some tissues, such as nerves, are unable to heal from injury or disease.

Lim hopes to overcome this by manipulating adult cells to make new connections, but that requires the ability to manipulate precisely how these cells interact with each other. .

“The properties of a tissue, such as skin, are largely determined by how different cells are organized within it,” said Harts Fellow at the Cell Design Institute and lead author of the paper. One Dr. Adam Stevens said: “.We are devising a way to control this cellular organization, which is central to allowing us to synthesize tissue with the properties we need.” [2]”

Different types of tissue differ from each other, and much of this diversity is due to how tightly the cells of the tissue are connected. They are very tightly bound but weakly bound by the immune system, allowing cells to flow through blood vessels and move between tightly bound cells in the skin and organs. Tissue for access to pathogens or wounds.

To control the quality of cell binding, researchers designed the adhesion molecule into two parts. One part of the molecule acts as a receptor outside the cell and determines which other cells to interact with, while the second part, located inside the cell, regulates the strength of the bond formed. The two parts can be mixed and matched in a modular fashion to create customized arrays of cells that combine in different ways across different cell types.

Deciphering the Code of Cell Aggregates

Stevens says these findings have other uses as well. For example, researchers can design tissues that model disease states to facilitate studies in human tissues.

Cell adhesion is a key development in the evolution of animals and other multicellular organisms, and custom adhesion molecules may provide a deeper understanding of how the path from unicellular to multicellular organisms began. not.

“It’s very exciting that we’re now able to understand more about how evolution began to build bodies,” he said. We are uncovering a flexible molecular adhesion code that determines which cells interact and how, and as we begin to gain a better understanding, this code can be used to direct how cells assemble into tissues and organs. THESE TOOLS CAN BE REALLY TRANSFORMATIVE [2]”

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05622-z
[2] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2022/12/424411/cellular-glue