Medical miracle at work in Ohio shopping mall

IN EVERY town in every part of this sprawling country, you can find a faceless sprawling strip mall.

Rarely though would you expect to find a medical miracle working behind the counter of the mall’s hobby shop. That, however, is what Ohio man Lee Spievak considers himself to be. “I put my finger in,” said Spievak, pointing to the propeller of a model airplane, “and that’s when I sliced my finger off”.

It took the end right off, down to the bone, about half an inch. Today though, you wouldn’t know it.

Spievak, 69, shows off his finger and it is all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print. How? Well that’s the truly remarkable part. It wasn’t a transplant. Spievak re-grew his finger tip using a powder — or pixie dust as he calls it.

Spievak’s brother Alan — who works in the field of regenerative medicine — sent him the powder. For ten days, Spievak put a little on his finger. “The second time I put it on I already could see growth. Each day it was up further. Finally it closed up and was a finger.” Now he says he has “complete feeling, complete movement”.

The “pixie dust” comes from the University of Pittsburgh, though Dr Stephen Badylak prefers to call it extra cellular matrix. The process he has been pioneering involves scraping the cells from the lining of a pig’s bladder. “There are all sorts of signals in the body,” explains Dr Badylak.

“We have got signals that are good for forming scars and others that are good for regenerating tissues.

“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 said.

In other words, when the extra cellular matrix is put on a wound, scientists believe it stimulates cells in the tissue to grow rather than scar. If they can perfect the technique, it might mean they could repair not just a severed finger, but severely burnt skin, or even damaged organs. They hope to soon start a trial in Buenos Aires on a woman who has cancer of the oesophagus. Usually, doctors remove the cancerous portion and try to stretch the stomach lining up to meet the shortened oesophagus. In the trial, they will hope to stimulate cells to re-grow the missing portion. So, could limbs be re-grown? Dr Badylak is cautious, but believes the technology is potentially revolutionary. “I think that within 10 years we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones... And that is a major step towards doing the entire limb.”

The US military are also interested. They are about to start trials to re-grow parts of the fingers of injured soldiers.

They also believe it could help repair the skin of soldiers who’ve suffered massive burn injuries.