TREKNOSIS: Making Dr. McCoy's Magic Pills Real

By Jon Sung - June 02, 2014


No worries. What nature doesn't provide, we'll achieve through science. The Gladstone Institutes have reported a breakthrough in the development of a technique that allows scientists to transform skin cells into heart muscle cells. It doesn't sound like much, but it's the first step down a road that could take us to seemingly miraculous new regenerative therapies and out of what Dr. Leonard McCoy once called “the Dark Ages” during a trip to the good old 1980s in a borrowed Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

Star Trek Doctors



The regenerative therapy road doesn't stop there, either. Walk down it far enough, and we might find ourselves in a world where doctors can literally regenerate an entire nonfunctional, or even missing organ -- without lifting a scalpel. Yesterday, that would have sounded like some goofball combination of incredible and impossible. To Dr. McCoy, that's Tuesday. Check out the good doctor's miracle cure from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. When McCoy asks an old woman, “What’s the matter with you?” she replies, “Kidney, dialysis.” McCoy reacts in horror and gives her a pill. Moments later, she’s being wheeled around the hospital, shouting, “Doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney!”

Star Trek Hospital


But why stop at new heart tissue? “The doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney!” could one day end up being more science reality than science fiction. Two of the biggest hassles in organ transplants today are rejection by the host and just being able to find the right organ for the right person from the right donor in the first place. How much easier would it be to just grow one of your own? Numerous companies are currently working on organogenesis to address a shortage of available, transplantable organs, and the UCLA Dream Fund is currently funding the development of an organogenesis XPRIZE to generate functioning, compatible organs (lung, kidney, heart, liver, pancreas) from a patient’s own cells. If any of this research pans out, a simple pill that'll sprout you a new, completely functional kidney doesn't seem so crazy after all.

source: Gladstone Institutes press release







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