‘Miracle powder re-grows finger’ - May 01, 2008
A man has re-grown a severed fingertip with the help of ‘pixie dust’ made from pig guts, according to some news reports. Others are suspicious.
The claims say Lee Spievak (or Spievack – there’s some disagreement), from Ohio, lost part of a finger to the propeller of a model airplane. He was told it wouldn’t grow back but thanks to miracle magic ‘pixie dust’ he now has a full finger. The dust is actually an ‘extra cellular matrix’, manufactured by a company called ACell from the insides of pigs.
In fact versions of this story said the same things in February on a CBS story. Oh, and in AP February last year, with many of the same quotes. How odd...
University of Pittsburgh researcher Stephen Badylak, who developed the matrix, is quoted as saying, “One way to think about these matrices is that we have taken out many of the stimuli for scar tissue formation and left those signals that were always there anyway for constructive remodelling,” he explains (BBC).
Rubbish, says Simon Kay, professor of hand surgery at the University of Leeds.
In the Guardian’s coverage Kay brands the claims “junk science”.
“It’s a ridiculous story – absurd and over-egged in the extreme," Kay said. “It looked to have been an ordinary fingertip injury with quite unremarkable healing. All wounds go through a repair process.”
If you could regenerate body parts using a miracle powder, he says, “your first port of call would be a serious science journal like Nature because it would be a Nobel prize winning revolution.”
You can judge the injury for yourself on the BBC’s video. In the Nature office we were divided into two groups: those who said ‘I’ve done worse to my fingers and they grew back’ and those who said ‘errrrrrrrrrrrr, that’s gross’.
Extra cellular matrices do perform a useful function. This is from a Texas A&M website, and they should know what they’re talking about, being the Center for Extracellular Matrix Biology and all:
extracellular matrix (ECM) is a biologically active tissue composed of a complex mixture of macromolecules, that in addition to serving a structural function, also profoundly affects the cellular physiology of an organism
It might be that creating an artificial one could help the body re-grow. The US army is apparently investigating this use. Have a read of this 2005 review from researchers at a number of US universities.
While this ‘new’ story is doubtless good PR for Acell, there doesn’t seem to be any actual new news here. Whatever the truth of the powder’s abilities, Spievak won’t be helping establish them. “I don’t plan on cutting anything more off to find out if I can grow that back,” he says (The Times).
Comments
Good PR for Acell
Bad news for pigs
Posted by: Dan | May 1, 2008 11:13 PM
BBC seems to have backtracked on the story.
It could possibly (probably?) be that the tip was lost, a bit of the nail and none of the bone. I would not like to try this on myself, but am told that this amount regrows naturally.
What is suspicious is Badylak saying "this is not yet ready for primetime".
A "finger" regrowing and other dramatic claims - see TED - Alan Russell: Why can't we grow new body parts? 2006 - where he claims Spievak was 79 and not 69 - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/142 - not yet ready for primetime? Give me a break.
Posted by: Richard | May 2, 2008 05:29 PM