Regenerative Bioscience Center harnesses the body’s natural healing ability

What began in 2004 as a relatively small group of researchers has since grown to include more than 40 members spanning seven colleges, including the College of Engineering, the College of Public Health, and the College of Pharmacy.

Together, the scientists aim to tackle medical challenges and develop cures and treatments for devastating diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and stroke.

What is Regenerative Bioscience?

You’re working in the garden, shoveling dirt to make room for a new plant. You look down and see what used to be a fully grown earthworm now bisected and missing its tail. But you don’t worry about it too much. You know the worm will regrow that missing part.

That’s regeneration.

Some worms, like the small aquatic flatworms Rachel Roberts-Galbraith studies, can even become two entirely separate, perfectly functional animals after being split in two. During this process, part of the flatworm, called a planarian, regenerates an entirely new brain.

One of the goals of the RBC is to figure out why people can’t do the same thing.

People can regrow a liver even when it’s been heavily damaged. But when human brains are injured, it’s much more of a guessing game whether the neurons and networks can heal—with or without medical treatment. Most of the time, they don’t.

“If we can figure out how brain regeneration works in animals, we might find some answers for people as well,” says Roberts-Galbraith, an assistant professor in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “Regeneration is an area of biomedicine that holds immense promise.

“When we find out these essential truths of how regeneration works, our goal is to try to translate that to human therapies. The RBC is the perfect place for that because we have natural partners for the next steps in that translation process.”

Reading the complete story on how UGA scholarship and biotech start-ups work together to develop new treatments and therapies.