In Pursuit of the Newt

It looks like a frog-but with a tail. Its legs are as long as its arms. Some live in water, and some are semiaquatic, returning to water to breed. But perhaps what´s most noteworthy about the newt is its remarkable ability to bounce back from what would be catastrophic injuries to other creatures. Front leg munched off by a predator? Another leg will grow in its place. Eye poked out by a fast-moving branch? The newt can fix that too. Even more complicated organs are not beyond the regenerative capacities of the little newt: intestines, spinal cord, and even heart can be recovered. It´s superhero material and, more close to home, it´s a model that researchers in regenerative medicine are not beyond aspiring to. Dr. Cato Laurencin was heard earlier this year encouraging his col leagues at the Annual Society for Biomaterials Conference to bring out the inner newt in all of us. Newts may be phylogenetically much lower than humans, but in the areas of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, advances in research have propelled us to the point that we might, in fact, aspire to newtness-before us lies the possibility and project of figuring out how we too might grow an entire limb or repair whole organs at the site of injury.