Your body naturally contains a chemical that can boost organ regeneration and speed up wound healing.
Epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) help new blood vessels to form, so Dipak Panigrahy at Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues wondered whether they might also accelerate other types of growth. To find out, they injected mice with EETs straight after the surgical removal of a lung or part of their liver.
Four days later, treated mice had 23 per cent more tissue growth in their remaining lung or 46 per cent more liver growth compared with mice that had received a placebo injection. Applying EETs to wounds in mice shortened healing time.
The team also showed that EET concentrations in blood trebled in the week after human liver donors had undergone surgery.
"This looks promising," says Dan Weiss, who studies lung regeneration at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
"EETs have been overlooked in regeneration schemes, so this might provide a window of opportunity."
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1311565110
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