Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Regenerative medicine in the not-so-distant future?
We tend to look five to fifteen years towards the future in our forecasts and maps. On the global health economy map we debuted at the Health Horizons Spring Conference, I felt our projections around the implementation of tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and body hacking to be fairly long stretches.
I love being proved wrong. The headline "Dawn of bioengineering in treating irregular heartbeats" just flashed across my screen ticker.
The story seems more improbable than most of our future forecasts: scientists at UC Davis were able to reconstruct the heart's sinoatrial (SA) node, the rhythm trigger point known as the heart's pacemaker. They did this by injecting an adenovirus carrying an engineered gene encoded to express a protein (HCN) into the heart
muscle (in this case, of a pig). Within a matter of days, the pig's heart generated a bioartificial SA nodes at the site of the injection. Within two weeks, the bioengineered nodes were functioning strongly enough that the electronic pacemaker maintaining the heart's rhythm was no longer necessary.
Given the similarities between human and pig hearts, this is strong evidence that bioengineered cells may replace electronic pacemakers in the not-so-distant future.