The leprosy bacterium could hold the secret to safely repairing and regenerating the body, say researchers at the University of Edinburgh (Great Britain). Animal experiments have revealed the bacteria’s ability to nearly double the size of livers by stimulating healthy growth.
It’s a sneakily selfish act that gives bacteria more tissue to infect, but scientists say figuring out how they do it could lead to new age-defying therapies.
Leprosy causes disability when it infects the nerves, skin, and eyes. But the bacteria that causes it, Mycobacterium lepraehas other unusual properties, such as the ability to perform “biological alchemy,” converting one type of body tissue into another.
The researchers turned to another animal that gets the disease: armadillos. The armadillo is the only other known host for the leprosy bacterium.
The experiments showed that the infection targets the armadillos’ liver, where it performs a controlled hijacking of the organ to reprogram it for its own purposes.
The hope is that the method could be harnessed to repair the livers of people awaiting a transplant.
The results, published in “Cell Reports Medicine”, show that the liver almost doubled in size.
This growth might be expected to be defective or even cancerous, but detailed analysis showed it to be healthy and functional, with the usual set of blood vessels and bile ducts.
LResearchers do not know how this regeneration occursbut they suspect that the leprosy bacterium somehow slows the clock of development in the liver.
Analysis of the activity of different parts of the liver cell DNA revealed a picture more like that of a much younger animal or even a fetus, when the liver is still forming.
The hope is that the method could be harnessed to repair the livers of people awaiting transplants, or even to reverse some of the damage caused by aging in other parts of the body.