Alekhya Reddy

Leveraging cancer mutations and metabolism for regenerative medicine applications

Started Dec. 12, 2023

Abstract or project description

This project aims to identify unique aspects of cancer metabolism, growth, and proliferation, utilizing them for applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Initially, we identify potential cancer mutations to expedite organ and tissue development. We explore the modulation of metabolic pathways to achieve similar objectives. Additionally, we investigate enhancing mitochondrial function for overall cell health and growth. Ethical concerns, regulatory concerns, future perspectives, and challenges are also discussed. Regenerative medicine has come far in the past couple of years, but it still has its limitations. Often, cells don’t grow fast nor do they grow well together, despite being similar in origin or even cultured from the same original sample. Organoids, grown using stem cells, can take months or even years to grow, despite being the size of a fingernail. At this point, growing organs big enough to perform all the needed functions in the human body may take years or even decades to grow. As of now, regenerative technology is focused on using stem cells to growth tissues and organs, with the types of stem cells being used including ESCs, which are isolated from a blastocyst, iPSCs, which are reprogrammed from adult tissues, or ASCs, which are isolated from nature tissues. Stem cells themselves are defined as undifferentiated cells that are capable of self-renewal and differentiation into diverse mature progenies, allowing them to play a central role in homeostasis, regeneration, and tissue genesis through their ability to provide new elements to increase tissue mass during growth and replace cell loss due to senescence or damage. Different stem cells have different capabilities in terms of their potency to grow different types of tissues, with zygote SCs having totipotency, embryonic SCs having pluripotency, and adult SCs having multi/unipotency. ESCs are able to generate any differentiated phenotype of the three primary germ layers through the differentiation process, while ASCs have a limited differentiation potential and are mainly responsible for turnover and repair within the tissue of origin. One of the biggest factors limiting the technology currently it the rate at which cells can grow, and in this paper, the use of cancer mutations in specific genes and metabolic pathways and the enhancement of mitochondrial function in order to leverage them for applications in regenerative medicine will be explored