Renaissance in Medicine

Mar 30, 2017 | Dennis Wigle, M.D., Ph.D. | @DennisWigleMD

Renaissance means rebirth or regeneration. Every few generations medicine takes a major turn. We’re at one of those junctures now with regenerative medicine — where healing is triggered from within the human body. It’s bringing a whole new universe to how physicians provide care.

Full article published March 2017, Discovery's Edge

More than half of the clinical trials that fall under the Center for Regenerative Medicine’s purview involve the use of stem cell-based therapies of one kind or another. Dennis Wigle, M.D., Ph.D., a thoracic surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, is performing one such trial aimed at regenerating lung tissue. He and his team are working to develop new therapies for people with a wide range of lung diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cystic fibrosis. First they collect cells from the skin of people with various end-stage lung diseases and then they turn them into patient-specific stem cells, and grow them into lung cells with a view towards delivering them back to the patient.

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