Brits Attack American Regrown Finger As “Junk Science” - With Video
Related: Yesterday’s Background Post
The Guardian:
A leading plastic surgeon today dismissed claims that a powder made from a pig’s bladder caused the regrowth of a man’s fingertip.
Professor Simon Kay, professor of hand surgery at the University of Leeds, said the claims by the US company that developed the powder were “junk science”.
Lee Spievack, a hobby store salesman in Cincinnati, Ohio, has claimed the treatment stimulated the regrowth of his right hand middle fingertip, which was severed in 2005 by the propeller of a model plane.
Spievack, 69, described the powder as “pixie dust”. It was developed by ACell - a company co-founded by his brother Alan, a former Harvard surgeon.
Within four weeks of using the preparation, he said his finger had regained its original length, and four months later “it looked like my normal finger”.
But Kay, consultant plastic and hand surgeon at St James’ University Hospital, Leeds, said Spievack’s injury did not look to have been serious from studying before and after photos.
“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.”
ACell, the company behind the claim, said it had already used the extract of pig bladder to treat ulcers and other wounds, and to help regrow cartilage.
The powder was mostly collagen and a variety of substances, without any pig cells, said Dr Stephen Badylak, a regeneration researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and scientific adviser to ACell.
He said it formed microscopic scaffolding for human cells to occupy, and emitted chemical signals to encourage those cells to regenerate tissue. The signals did not specifically say “make a finger” but cells picked up that message from their surroundings, Badylak said.
“We’re not smart enough to figure out how to regrow a finger,” Badylak said. “Maybe what we can do is bring all the pieces of the puzzle to the right place and then let mother nature take its course.
“But we are very uninformed about how all of this works. There’s a lot more that we don’t know than we do know.”
Kay said there was “no evidence” that ACell had manipulated the regenerative capabilities of the human body.
“There’s no clinical evidence to support the claims,” he said. “It really is junk science.
“If you could regenerate body parts like this, your first port of call would be a serious science journal like Nature because it would be a Nobel prize winning revolution.”
British scientists have led the way in research into genetic treatments that could enable humans to regrow limbs damaged by accidents or surgery and allow patients to recover from wounds without scarring.
A charity, the Healing Foundation, which funds research into pioneering scientific techniques, set up a 25-year project in 2005 with the University of Manchester to advance the understanding of wound healing and tissue regeneration.
The Healing Foundation Centre aims to unravel the genetic quirks that allow certain amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders, to recover from severe injuries by generating fresh body tissue. By identifying the genetic mechanisms involved, the researchers hope to develop medical treatments that do the same in humans.
Professor Enrique Amaya, a tissue engineer at Manchester University and leader of the project, is investigating the regenerative capabilities of frogs. Frog embryos share the human embryo’s ability to heal wounds without scars in a matter of hours. Frogs can also regrow appendages.
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I call bullshit on this. It looks like the fleshy tip just got sliced. Nasty, but that heals on it’s own. Now if it had been cut off at the joint and grew back, then I’d be impressed.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:38 amSpeaking from personal experience, the tip does NOT grow back. I had a mishap with a table saw and cut about half an inch of of my right thumb, down to the bone. I saved the tip in a bag of ice and the doctor at the hospital attached it with a lot of stitches. The orthopedic surgeon told me at my age (52) that I should not expect to have it reattach. We then discussed all sorts of grafts that could be done with what was left of my thumb. I contacted these Acell people, but was informed that they already were working on several soldiers that had their entire hand blown off, and couldn’t help me with my minor injury. Fortunately I had a friend in the bio-med field who supplied me with pills that stimulated my own adult stem cell production. In about 5 weeks the tip turned black and the surgeon removed it. He was amazed that there was a new tip that had grown underneath the old one, and told me flatly that it was impossible. I believe that the stem cells did have something to do with it and that this story might not be as far fetched as it sounds.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:51 pmBTW, according to my surgeon, it is easier to reattach a finger if it was cut off at the joint because you have all the arteries still intact. The tip doesnt get blood flow, so it dies, and that was why I would have needed the graft.