A new study in Cell Reports suggests a way that mere mortals can potentially speed their recovery from a wide variety of injuries. Researchers shows that by “priming” the body before an injury, you can speed up the process of tissue repair and recovery like how a vaccine prepares the body to fight infection.
The study builds upon previous finding: When one part of the body suffers an injury, adult stem cells in uninjured areas throughout the body enter a primed or alert state. Alert stem cells have an enhanced potential to repair tissue damage.
Study on mice:
In this new study, researchers identified a signal that alerts stem cells and showed how it could serve as a therapy to improve healing. Searching for a signal that could alert stem cells, researchers focused their attention on the blood. They injected blood from an injured mouse into an uninjured mouse. In the uninjured mouse, this caused stem cells to adopt to an alert state.
They identified the critical signal in blood that alerted stem cells: an enzyme called Hepatocyte Growth Factor Activator (HGFA). Under normal circumstances, HGFA is abundant in the blood, but inactive. Injury activates HGFA, so HGFA signaling can alert stem cells to be ready to heal.
Leveraging this discovery, researchers asked the question: What happens if HGFA alerts stem cells before an injury occurs? Does this improve the repair response? They injected active HGFA into mice that received either a muscle or skin injury few days later. The mice healed quicker, began running on their wheels sooner and even regrew their fur better than mice that did not receive the HGFA booster.
These findings indicate that HGFA can alert many different types of stem cells, rousing them from their normal resting or quiescent state and preparing them to respond quickly and efficiently to injury. This could of therapeutic value to improve recovery in situations where injuries can be anticipated such as in surgery, combat or sports.
This therapeutic approach could prove useful for people with impaired healing such as older adults or diabetics. This work shows that there are factors in the blood that control our ability to heal. Researchers are looking at how HGFA might explain declines in healing and how we can use HGFA to restore normal healing.