The Nation's Investment in Cancer Research

Anthony Atala on Tissue Regeneration and Stem Cells

Using a process he likens to “baking a layer cake,” Dr. Atala is creating new organs and other tissues in the laboratory. Dr. Atala, director of the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine, leads a team of more than 150 investigators doing this transformative work. The researchers remove postage stamp-size tissue samples from cancer patients. “We start by placing cells, one layer at a time, into three dimensional scaffolding, and then we place this new tissue into the body for baking,” said Dr. Atala. In a recent clinical trial at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, a patient had a bladder transplant — with a new organ grown from her own cells. Just eight weeks after physicians harvested the patient’s tissue, her new bladder was in the operating room ready for transplant. This technique shows promise to move forward from the experimental stage. Private industry bought the license and is now producing the bladders that Dr. Atala and his group created at Wake Forest.

The biggest challenge, Dr. Atala says, is to get cells to grow in large quantities outside the body, and that is where stem cells may play a vital role. Peering into the future, Dr. Atala says he would like to induce regeneration inside the body, by using stem cells to regenerate part of an organ at the site of injury or disease. Ultimately, “studying cancer stem cells will open the window to understanding how to best use a patient’s own cells for cancer therapy, because you want to make sure the cells you’re producing are normal cells. From this better understanding we should also be able to figure out what is the switch that could make them abnormal.”

Advances in regenerative medicine have been made possible by gathering and pooling expertise in bioengineering, cell biology, physiology, surgery, molecular biology, and other fields. “NCI plays a major role in the acceleration of these new technologies,” Dr. Atala noted. “This technology has broad-reaching implications for all types of diseases, not just for cancer.”