Regrowing nerves and healing wounds without scarring? It might seem a little too sci-fi right now, but one Main Line Health scientist has dedicated her career to finding the secret to regeneration, writes Tom Avril for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

She is getting close, but not all of her peers are as optimistic as she is that a drug can provide super-healing abilities.

What led Ellen Heber-Katz to embark on this quest in the first place was an accidental discovery she made while studying autoimmune diseases.

She noticed that laboratory mice receiving an experimental drug developed super-healing abilities. Holes that were punched in their ears healed up completely without any scarring within a few weeks.

On further exploration, Ellen Heber-Katz found that this super-healing was caused by an unexpected response to an autoimmune disease.

She and her team then isolated what that response was and duplicated it with a drug compound.

Heber-Katz now at Lankenau Institute for Medical Research is testing the drug’s performance against a variety of conditions including nerve damage, periodontal disease, and osteoporosis.

So far, all her research has been in laboratory mice and rats though so it is unclear if the drug would be as successful in humans.

Some of Heber-Katz’s peers are skeptical of true regeneration being possible for humans.

Read more about the research of Main Line Health’s Ellen Heber-Katz in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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