Human cells do two contradictory things equally well. One of those things, regeneration, sustains life; the other, degeneration, is detrimental and leads to death.
As time passes, the body’s mechanism of regeneration starts to fall apart, and damage that would have been easily repaired leads instead to what scientists call fibrosis. The real-life term is aging.
Dr. Fabio Rossi, director at the Biomedical Research Centre at the University of British Columbia, has spent his career figuring out what makes tissues regenerate or irreversibly degenerate. “In many tissues, one type of damage repairs perfectly well but if the damage continues, at some point, you completely lose the ability to repair,” he says. “This is what happens in chronic diseases. Acute disease, we can manage—chronic disease, not so well.”
Fibrosis is reportedly involved in a large percentage of deaths in developed countries like Canada. Rossi, who runs a lab where 20 scientists work on various projects looking into how stem cells can mend damaged tissues or contribute to their degeneration, believes that the discoveries made today could change how we age in the future.
