14 DAY TRIAL // A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has recently announced a major breakthrough in medicine: the method for making human collagen in the lab.
This is extremely important Scientists have been seeking a way to make synthetic collagen for at least 30 years. In clinical settings, human collagen would be preferred over bovine collagen because the material now gleaned from cows can prompt an unwanted immune response in patients and it can harbor animal pathogens that might infect humans.
The work is important because it opens a door to producing a material that can have broad use in medicine and replace the animal products that are now used but that can also harbor pathogens or spark undesirable immune responses. What's more, the new work may also lay the foundation for applications in nanotechnology, such as microscopic sensors that could be implanted in humans to confront the effects of disease.
Collagen is the most important structural protein in the body, reinforcing connective tissue, bones and teeth, and forming long, fibrous cables to strengthen tendons. In addition, it forms sheets of tissue that support the skin and every internal organ.
Currently, doctors use collagen from animals, principally cows, to rebuild tissue destroyed by burns and wounds and in plastic surgery to "retouch" the starlets' lips and cheeks.
So far, researchers have failed to synthesize human collagen in the lab, mainly because of the inability to link the easily made short snippets of collagen into the long, fibrous.
But University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have done more than just to synthesize collagen. They are now able to improve the qualities of this substance.
"We can make collagen that duplicates nature exactly, but we can diverge from that when it is desirable," says Ronald T. Raines, a UW-Madison professor of biochemistry who, with postdoctoral fellow Frank W. Kotch, authored the new PNAS study.
"Now we can make synthetic collagen that's longer than natural collagen. We just don't have to take what nature gives us. We can make it longer and stronger," Raines added.