A new partnership between North Carolina
State University
and Wake Forest Baptist
Medical Center
will make regenerative medical treatments more quickly available to both human
and animal patients.
NC State's Center for Comparative Medicine and Translational Research
(CCMTR) and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest
Baptist Medical
Center are pooling
resources in order to find safe and effective ways to use cells to regenerate
damaged organs in people and pets. Jorge Piedrahita, PhD, professor of genomics
at NC State and interim director of the CCMTR, believes that this partnership
will not only benefit companion animals right away, but will also help bring
these therapies to human patients more quickly.
"A major part of our work will be to translate laboratory research results
into medical therapies for companion animals," Piedrahita says. "The ability to
study diseases that affect organ health in animals is critically useful for
advances in human medicine as these animals share our environment and the vast
majority of our genes. Also, there are some human therapies currently in use
that companion animals can benefit from right away, such as bladder tissue
regeneration."
The official collaboration will include the exchange of students and
faculty, as well as joint research projects and publications.
"We are delighted to form a partnership with our colleagues at the Center
for Comparative Medicine and Translational Research," says Anthony Atala, MD,
director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The goal of
the collaboration is to develop advanced treatments for companion animals as
well as accelerate new regenerative medicine therapies for human patients."
At the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, more than 250 scientists in the
fields of biomedical and chemical engineering, cell and molecular biology,
biochemistry, pharmacology, physiology, materials science, nanotechnology,
genomics, proteomics, surgery, and medicine work to grow tissues and organs and
develop healing cell therapies for more than 30 different areas of the body.
The CCMTR is a community of more than 100 NC State scientists who
collaborate in "One Medicine" studies with government, private, and academic
researchers to advance knowledge and practical applications that improve the
health of animals and humans.
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