What do I keep tellin ya? Stay alive! The world is changing fast; medical science is advancing by leaps and bounds.
The time will soon come when you don’t have to die because your kidneys are shot or you had a heart attack or stroke. We can regrow limbs or organs.
You could even go back to normal…or better: back to how you were when you were younger and healthier.
How? By re-growing our bodies; or at least key parts of the body that have been damaged.
It’s already happening. You heard me!
The tissue structure of our bodies, called the matrix, was once thought to be mere scaffolding; something to which cells were stuck. But it much more than that: the matrix is an aware, intelligent structure that can program itself to regenerate any organ, from bone to brains. Scientists are just now learning to tap into its amazing powers of growth and tissue construction.
Your job is to keep healthy till this new science is perfected. I can help you with that. Get my truly prophetic book “How to Live Beyond 100 Years”.
A Remarkable Bandage
For example, Elizabeth Loboa of the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, is a materials engineer who had developed a special kind of self-destructing super-bandage capable of healing infected wounds quickly, without scarring or standard antibiotics.
You apply the bandage and then the special material degrades until nothing is left but your own, newly regenerated, healthy cells. Call it a super-Bandaid!
Some researchers have already succeeded in building entire organs from scratch, and the new technique may one day play a role in repairing damaged brains.
Earlier this year, Harald Ott of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston built the world’s first functioning home-grown kidney, a wildly complex organ that stem cell researchers have always assumed needed to be grown from scratch using numerous different cell types.
Ott was astonished to find that although he fed only two types of cells into a decellularized kidney matrix – blood-like stem cells into the blood vessels, and endothelial cells into the labyrinthine plumbing that filters the blood – all the different kinds of cells formed in the sites where they were supposed to.
“It’s pretty exciting stuff,” says Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson of Gothenberg University in Sweden. “We’re trying to create a whole new human being.”
Well, let me tell you where they need to pay homage: to Nature. She’s smart; very, very smart. Give her the tools and get out of the way, is my advice!
The Body Matrix
No, not a computer-simulated reality; just the basics of tissue structure. This is the stuff that remains if you strip away the living cells from, say, a blood vessel, an organ or a bit of skin. This scaffolding gives the various parts of our body their detailed shape and solidity.
That was all it was thought to do. Early experiments at organ regeneration used detergent to strip cells way from this matrix and then used it as an inert chassis or a template. It was re-populated with stem cells, which grew back the original organ.
But—and don’t I keep telling you this is the ONLY medicine—scientists finally started to get rid of their preconceived ideas and look at Nature herself. It finally became obvious that the structure of the matrix is secondary, it has many functional roles. 
While it consists mainly of inanimate structural proteins such as collagen and elastin, it also contains signaling proteins that coax the right cells to be in the right place at the right time. For example, hook-like molecules called fibronectins and integrins provide tailored “molecular Velcro” for specific cells.
Once the right cells have been summoned, the matrix can coax them to turn into bone, regrow muscle tissue or fat cells. The secret, apparently, lies in which they are subjected to once inside the matrix. For example, high tension in the matrix’s structure will persuade any incoming stem cells to become muscle or bone. Place them into a saggier matrix and they become fat cells. 1
Finally, having convinced cells to develop into the right kind of tissue, the matrix nourishes them so that they continue to mature into larger structures. Its material even contains potent growth factors that help blood vessels to form, which provide nourishing oxygen for the growing organs.
The way is wide open for an amazing, unforeseen future. The kidneys worked so well in rats that Ott is now using similar techniques to develop other organs; it is projected that hearts, lungs, esophaguses, larynxes, livers, small intestines and pancreases will soon be able to be recreated.
Let me repeat: you won’t just get back the crappy organ that just failed. You get a whole new one, 100% working and filled with youthful vitality!
Now you see why I am urging you just to do what’s needed, stay healthy and stick around for a whole new you…
What About Regrowing Muscle Tissue?
Muscle is not quite so easy. Damaged muscle can regrow to some extent, but if a severe injury destroys too much of one specific muscle group, scar tissue prevents
it from growing back. Such an injury—for example vehicle crash trauma or battle wounds—usually mean amputation and a prosthesis.
A tray of baby livers, gown from stem cells!
But what if you could use the matrix to attract and grow muscle from a person’s own cells?
Already a trial in which matrix taken from a pig (qualitatively quite like human tissue) has been used to regrow big chunks of muscle in six people who had lost more than half of a muscle in road accidents or other trauma.
The early results have been astounding. Six months later, the pig matrix is gone, replaced by a completely new, natural matrix from the volunteers’ own bodies – with muscle to match.
Ron Strang, a 28-year-old US marine whose quadriceps muscle had been destroyed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, volunteered.
Strang couldn’t even get out of a chair without assistance, but after surgical clearance of all residual scar tissue and replacing it with a strip of matrix, the results were sensational.
“I go out hiking,” Strang says, “and I’m able to ride a bike.” He has also taken up football and basketball. This is a guy who before treatment couldn’t stand!
Even Bone
Building muscle is one thing. But what about rebuilding shattered bone? That’s what Carmell Therapeutics in Pittsburgh is trying to do. They have chosen matrix material that is effectively a highly concentrated blood clot. The success of recent animal studies prompted them to begin a trial in human volunteers.
The dough-like substance carries high concentrations of growth factors known to promote bone repair. In a year-long trial in South Africa, this “bone putty” was applied to the broken shin bones, or tibiae, of 10 volunteers.
The accelerated healing the group has seen should help them win approval for larger trials, planned in Europe, and work on other bones.
Renewing Blood Vessels
Synthetic matrix can also be used as a template to build body parts far stronger than those Nature provides. One group that could benefit enormously would be the millions of people who undergo kidney dialysis every year.
Dialysis is rough on the body: you need to be hooked into machines that cleanse the blood three times a week, with a large arm vein punctured. To do a few days of the kidneys’ work in a few hours, blood must be forced through the system quickly. This heavy use often makes the veins collapse, so doctors have to continually reopen them.
It’s harrowing and painful.
Now we have customized natural vein matrix parts that are stronger than the real thing. To do this, scientists first crafted a fast-decaying biodegradable polymer into a tube exactly the dimensions of a vein, but with a thicker vessel wall.
Then they coated this tube with human smooth-muscle cells. Within days, the cells completely replaced the biodegradable tube with a matrix of natural collagen, identical to a patient’s own.
After stripping off the cells, these tubes were then surgically implanted in the patient, and served as the vein for dialysis.
The results have been so positive, we will soon see artificial blood vessels grafted as coronary bypass arteries.
Your Brain Too?
It’s almost the holy grail of regenerating organs. Will we be able to re-create brains, as good as new? I hope so, otherwise there is no future for politicians!
Seriously though, it’s theoretically possible.
Greg Bix of the University of Kentucky in Lexington discovered a key component of the matrix that could promote brain repair all on its own: a signaling molecule released from brain matrix that has been damaged by stroke, called perlecan domain five (DV). It promotes the growth of new blood vessels. When Bix injected DV into mice and rats deliberately given strokes, the results were astounding. “In a fortnight,” he says, “you couldn’t tell they’d had strokes.”
Until Time the Time Comes…
Here’s What you Can Do…
It’s true, we are all growing older. But that doesn’t mean we have to age. Until the time comes where more research has been done and the new science of the matrix has been perfected, your job is to stay healthy.
You are certain to live far longer than you once planned, so why not do it well and enjoy your “Third Age” years to the fullest.
In my remarkable book “How to Live Beyond 100 Years”, I tell you all the latest science, organ by organ, system by system, explaining what you need to know and what you need to do to stay healthy longer. Go here, I have the science, if you have the willingness to learn it…
To Staying Young & Healthy,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby