More than 1.5 million Americans have lost a limb. Prosthetic limbs have greatly advanced in function and appearance, but the authors of the new paper acknowledge that the devices still have many limitations.
Some patients over the past 20 years have received hand transplants from donors, but this procedure comes attached with lifelong risks from immunosuppressive therapy.
This problem could be solved by using the patient's own progenitor cells to regenerate the tissue for a new limb - rather than rely on a donor - but an appropriate matrix or scaffold has yet to be devised on which scientists would be able to grow the new tissue.
"The composite nature of our limbs makes building a functional biological replacement particularly challenging," explains senior author Dr. Harald Ott, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Surgery and the Center for Regenerative Medicine.
Credit By medicalnewstoday.com
