February 2008
For UW professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering Dr. Buddy Ratner, the flights of fancy science fiction writers dream up are not just entertaining, they can also be a source of inspiration.
“There’s been a lot of wonderful visionaries that have been unencumbered,” Ratner said of science fiction authors. “Once you envision it, people start to wonder: Can you make it?”
Though Ratner’s office displays no signs of an inner Trekkie or other indications of sci-fi obsession, it seems the genre he occasionally enjoys does creep into his work.
“I just put a proposal into the NIH (National Institutes of Health) on a new way to do diagnosis,” Ratner said. “It’s almost inspired by the show ‘Star Trek,’ where rather than taking a blood sample and doing a million analyses and trying to diagnose what the patient has, they pass a wand over the patient … Can we get a universal diagnosis device that would assess our whole health and give us another way to look at diagnosis and heath?
“I can daydream about that and I can think of ways that you might do that, and see if I can get some funding to test some of these ideas and should they test out, that would be revolutionary.”
With “Star Trek”-inspired devices next on his list, Ratner is meanwhile focused on projects here at UW that are no less incredible.
He discusses many of them in a new UWTV program, “Rebuilding the Baby Boomer: Replacement Parts for the 21st Century.” Ratner’s lecture explores how he and other researchers are engineering human tissue and even organs, improving the use of artificial limbs and restoring sight to the blind though amazing new medical innovations.
Ratner came to UW in 1972, the same year he completed his Ph.D. in polymer chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In addition to teaching at UW, Ratner also directs University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB), an engineering research center focused on biomaterial research that is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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The bioengineering field has certainly taken great strides since Ratner joined the ranks in ’72.
“Back then all we could think about was machines and mechanics,” Ratner said. “But so much has been discovered in biology since that time … suddenly we have a lot of biological tools that we can use.”
Ratner enjoys his line of work for its interdisciplinary and creative nature. It takes the collaborative efforts of bioengineers, chemists, electrical and mechanical engineers, pathologists and fundamental biologists to bring together the amazing advances in his field.
“And it always seems like you’re doing some good, he added. “It’s nice to be helping people.”
Current UW projects are focused on developing replacement bladders, hearts, esophagi, corneas and more.
“There’s quite a number of interesting things going on here,” Ratner said.
UW has been at the forefront of bioengineering for decades.
“There’s a lot of precedent here,” Ratner said, naming the first successful artificial kidneys treatments and development of the modern ultrasound as examples.
“We’re pioneers here,” Ratner said. “But the field keeps that way, it’s one where you can dream science fiction, you just got to make it come true.”
Today’s bioengineers are ultimately working toward a “grow your own” solution, as Ratner says.
By using a person’s own cells to regrow tissue and entire organs, researchers like Ratner can create ideal replacement parts for the aging baby boomer generation and others in need.
“Most amphibians can regrow limbs very nicely,” Ratner explained. “You cut it completely off and that stump turns to something called a blastema and the blastema grows out into a whole new limb. We all did this once while we were in the womb, why can’t we do it again? What stops us? What turns us off from reconstructing this? It’s in there someplace. It’s programmed within us. We can grow this and do this.”
Growing your own is the perfect solution because artificial parts are hindered by the foreign body reaction, while transplants are always in short supply, sometimes in poor condition and require a lifetime immunosuppressive drug regimen.
“Ultimately, the natural biology is simply going to be better,” Ratner said. “The more we learn about tissue engineering, the brighter the future is going to be in replacement parts.”
The foreign body reaction is what prevents artificial implants in the body from healing as a functioning part of the body. Our body reacts to all foreign bodies just as it would to a bullet or a splinter.
Ratner envisions advances that would negate this reaction.
“What if we could put a surface treatment on the titanium that the body looks at and says, ‘Ah, this is self. Let me integrate it, let me incorporate it,’” Ratner said.
When a solution to the foreign body reaction is solved, the next step to improving artificial parts like a leg prosthesis would be to connect the brain directly to the replacement part, and its motor.
“Can we put an electrode ray in the brain and have it work motors within that leg in response to your thinking, your needs?” Ratner wondered. “Once you can do that, there’s a couple of interesting implications to this. Motors are very strong: Can we make a leg that’s actually better than this existing leg? It might be stronger, much less sensitive to pain, faster, more facile, could even look nicer. In principle, we could make a leg that does all these things.
“What would happen if a person that had a perfectly good leg said ‘I don’t want this junky piece of biology, I want this super leg – two of them!’
“This starts to get into some very interesting ethical ground. What physician is going to take off a natural leg and put on one of these things? Some probably will for a fee. What if there are leg dealerships like car dealerships and you could get a Maserati leg or you could get a Ford leg?”
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As for advances in transplants, a tissue-engineered skin substitute holds promise for the future. Using cells called dermal fibroblasts harvested from the foreskins of newborns, two companies are currently manufacturing the skin replacement product. Though these tissues are engineered using cells from others, fibroblast cells are not very immunogenic, and thus the bioengineered skin does not commonly elicit the same rejection response as a donated organ.
“If we understood this process of the immunology, if we could get a heart on the shelf, maybe the doctor might take that heart out and treat it, so it becomes your own immune system,” Ratner said. “So this could be the ideal: There’d be eyes and there’d be stomachs, they’d just be sitting in the stockroom like we have hip joints and plastic eye implants now.”
Currently, the future lies in building replacement parts using a person’s own cells. Already, bladders, blood vessels and cartilage are all being grown and successfully implanted back into the cell donor.
As more and more bioengineered parts are successful, the question becomes, as Ratner says: What do we die from?
“Cancer?” Ratner wondered. “We’re certainly learning a lot about controlling cancers. Get rid of cancer, get rid of diabetes, get rid of heart disease – what does kill us? How long can we go? Would we be immortal?
“What about the brain? Does that wear out?
“It’s hard to think how we would replace a brain, although it looks more and more likely like we can grow more neurons and repair damaged areas, so maybe we can keep the brain young and repair it.”
And yet immortality brings up its own set of problems, like overpopulation.
So is Ratner on board to become a bionic human in the future?
“I happen to feel that I’ve been given excellent personal health, but inevitably, parts wear out,” he said. “That’s what this is really all about, is how are we going to fix people? People want this balance of quality life and longevity.”
Plenty of opportunity for future problem solving remains.
“I certainly encourage my students to look at tissue engineering,” Ratner said.
“What we spend right now for repair and replacement of tissues and organs is $100 billion. Money of that magnitude – and you can see we don’t even do a very good job at it – suggests there’s a lot of room for an opportunity, there’s money to be made, there’s good to be done, helping people.”
