Amphibians give clues to the regeneration game

The team from the Swanson School of Engineering took their inspiration from the natural world where amphibians are able to regenerate severed limbs. A paper detailing the research has been published in Nano Letters.

‘This is one of the holy grails of materials science,’ said principal investigator Anna C. Balazs, PhD. ‘While others have developed materials that can mend small defects, there is no published research regarding systems that can regenerate bulk sections of a severed material. This has a tremendous impact on sustainability because you could potentially extend the lifetime of a material by giving it the ability to regrow when damaged.’

Tissue regeneration in amphibians is guided by three sets of instructions – initiation, propagation, and termination – which Dr. Balazs described in a statement as a ‘beautiful dynamic cascade’ of biological events.

‘When we looked at the biological processes behind tissue regeneration in amphibians, we considered how we would replicate that dynamic cascade within a synthetic material,’ Dr. Balazs said. ‘We needed to develop a system that first would sense the removal of material and initiate regrowth, then propagate that growth until the material reached the desired size and then, self-terminate the process.’