Originally Posted by panthro
Beyond transplanting skin I dont think they can easily add actual flesh. It’d make more sense if they put in plastic like they’d do anywhere else in the body. Watch for cutting edge developments, cartilage Ive heard of just not there but smooth muscle Ive not seen that yet
You’re very right about the cutting edge developments, Panthro. I have bad joint problems and thus keep up with the newest in stem cell research. In the human knee, they’ve evolved the process of growing hyaline cartilage from a surgery which requires implantation of a scaffold, to just recently (I mean within the last 1.5 years recently) being able to do this completely by injection alone (injectable gels and even injectable scaffolds that expand once injected), thus not requiring the damaging application of surgery (which causes scar tissue, can damage nerves, cause atrophy, loss of function, etc).
This is the same with every tissue in the body. If you can think of a tissue in the body, TRUST me, there’s a company or college somewhere vigorously researching each day the most optimum way to turn stem cells into that tissue. It requires different mixes of growth factors and other chemicals, and you have to get it just right to have optimum results. They are studying how to turn stem cells into everything - ligaments, tendons, bone, organs (think total heart repair via injection 50 years at most from now), and yes, smooth muscle. Much of that is actually already attainable (ligaments, tendons etc), but the trick of finding the optimum chemical cocktail for many of these things is still several years away for much of it. For instance, they know how to regenerate ligaments - but they need to find the ideal chemical cocktail to make it regenerate into the strongest ligament possible.
Not even one month ago, scientists finally figured out how to, with 100% efficiency, coax cultured skin cells into stem cells. Beforehand, they could only produce stem cells at 10% of the speed. This means that every single clinical trial involving stem cells EVERYWHERE in the world just had a significant part of conducting the trial sped up by nearly ten fold. Check it out: http://www.natu re.com/news/ste … iciency-1.13775
So yes, there is hope, not only for our joints but maybe 15-20 years from now, for our old, PE-ridden dicks.