New technology starts healing injuries almost instantly

Does the healing and repairing of injuries almost instantly sound unreal? A new technology, which is designed to generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient's own body, manages to do exactly that.

The new technology called Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT) has been developed by researchers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State's College of Engineering. The research team conducted a regenerative study, and the results are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The TNT technology can be used to repair or restore aging tissues, damaged organs, blood vessels, and nerve cells. Normal skin cells can be converted into vascular cells to help heal the wounds. "By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced,” says Dr. Chandan Sen, director of Ohio State's Center for Regenerative Medicine & Cell Based Therapies who co-led the study with L. James Lee, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. Dr. Sen also says, “We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements of any organ that is declining."

In lab tests, experiments were conducted on mice with injured legs, and the TNT technology was able to heal their injuries successfully in only three weeks. Skin cells were reprogrammed to become vascular cells in badly injured legs that lacked blood flow. Active blood vessels appeared in the injured leg within a week and by the second week, the leg was saved. This technology was also used to reprogram skin cells in brain-injured mice to help them recover from a stroke. TNT can be implemented at the point of care and doesn't require any laboratory-based procedures. The procedure is also non-invasive and merely zapping the device administers a small electrical charge that most patients can’t even feel.

There is ongoing research to understand the mechanism and refine it further. Clinical trials will begin next year to test this technology on humans.

DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2017.134