UKM scores another first in tissue engineering
KUALA LUMPUR, 24 Sept 2013 – Can patients with heart problems or people suffering the agonising pain of osteoarthritis be cured without medication or major surgery?
Head of The National University of Malaysia’s (UKM) Tissue Engineering Centre, Prof Dr Ruzymah Idrus was affirmative that tissue engineering is the answer.
Giving her inaugural lecture here today, she said tissue engineering will change the medical field in the future. Prof Ruzymah and her team is known for developing a cutting edge technology to create human skin.
Using tissue engineering technology, the team have successfully grown human skin which can help burn victims and diabetics heal much faster while eliminating the risk of tissue rejection. This is without the need of extensive and painful skin replacement surgery.
Tissue engineering can be understood by watching a lizard losing its tail. Whenever its tail got cut off it grows back. The study of tissue engineering is basically trying to give humans the same ability to grow their own organs, Prof Ruzymah said. This had been done by her with the human skin.
She narrated an extraordinary case that amazed world scientists where a 4 year old girl who suffered severe burns on her body and was already in a life threatening condition. The normal treatment for burn victims is split skin grafting (SSG), where healthy skin is cut off from the body of the patient and pasted on the wound.
However in the little girl’s case doctors tried the procedure several times but it did not work resulting in the only healthy skin left which is big enough for SSG was her scalp. The parents had almost accepted that their daughter was not going to live. They wanted her to go with some dignity and had thus declined for her scalp to be removed.
But the doctors were not about to give up on the girl so they contacted Prof Ruzymah and persuaded her to help the girl and she agreed.
Prof Ruzymah took a small piece of skin from the girl’s body and began to grow it in her lab. She then transferred the larger piece of skin to the girl’s body. They were worried that because it is a new technology and have not been tried before, it might not work.
But to make a long story short, the little girl’s wounds healed with minimal scaring and later she was able to walk out of the hospital on her own. Prof Ruzymah with tears in her eyes was thankful that “the girl came and celebrated her fifth birthday in the Tissue Engineering Centre with us.’’
Since then the cutting edge technology has been patented and is now awaiting clinical trial before it can be made available to the public.
What this means is that patients who require skin replacement will not have to undergo the painful treatment of SSG. That development is the tip of the iceberg.
Prof Ruzymah is also now experimenting on several other organs of the human body and they have successful created the human bone.
She said tissue engineering have immense benefits. As an example she mentioned that a patient who requires a heart bypass surgery would only need a stem cell injection and a new blood vessel will be able to grow bypassing the blocked vessel.
A person who is suffering from osteoarthritis will also no longer have to put up with the pain for with tissue engineering technology a new cartilage can be grown. This means that a person with knee cap problems can just take an injection and the knee cap can go back to its normal and healthy condition.
However, Prof Ruzymah said it would be quite sometime yet before they can get there.
Vice Chancellor Prof Tan Sri Dato’ Seri Dr Sharifah Hapsah Syed Hassan Shahabudin, Faculty Deans, Heads of Department, medical specialists and students attended the talk.
