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NC State, Wake Forest, Collaborate to Bring Stem Cell Therapies to Humans, Animals

A new partnership between North Carolina State University and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center will make regenerative medical treatments more quickly available to both human and animal patients.

NC State’s Center for Comparative Medicine and Translational Research (CCMTR) and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center are pooling resources in order to find safe and effective ways to use cells to regenerate damaged organs in people and pets. Dr. Jorge Piedrahita, professor of genomics at NC State and interim director of the CCMTR, believes that this partnership will not only benefit companion animals right away, but will also help bring these therapies to human patients more quickly.

“A major part of our work will be to translate laboratory research results into medical therapies for companion animals,” Piedrahita says. “The ability to study diseases that affect organ health in animals is critically useful for advances in human medicine as these animals share our environment and the vast majority of our genes. Also, there are some human therapies currently in use that companion animals can benefit from right away, such as bladder  tissue regeneration.”

The official collaboration will include the exchange of students and faculty, as well as joint research projects and publications.

“We are delighted to form a partnership with our colleagues at the Center for Comparative Medicine and Translational Research,” says Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “The goal of the  collaboration is to develop advanced treatments for companion animals as well as accelerate new regenerative medicine therapies for human patients.”

At the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, more than 250 scientists in the fields of biomedical and chemical engineering, cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, pharmacology, physiology, materials science, nanotechnology, genomics, proteomics, surgery and medicine work to grow tissues and organs and develop healing cell therapies for more than 30 different areas of the body.

The CCMTR is a community of more than 100 NC State scientists who collaborate in “One Medicine” studies with government, private, and academic researchers to advance knowledge and practical applications that improve the health of animals and humans.

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