This TED Talk features regenerative tissue engineer Caitlin Sadler, recorded live at TED 2018.

What if you could take a pill or a vaccine, and just like getting over a cold, you could heal your wounds faster?

Today, if we have an operation or an accident, we're in the hospital for weeks and often left with scars and painful side effects of our inability to regenerate or regrow healthy uninjured organs.

I work to create materials that instruct our immune system to give us the signals to grow new tissues.

Just like vaccines instruct our body to fight disease, we could instead instruct our immune system to build tissues

and more quickly heal wounds.

Now, regrowing body parts out of nowhere might seem like magic,

but there's several organisms that can achieve this feat. Some lizards can

regrow their tails. The humble salamander can completely regenerate their arm, and even us

mere humans can regrow our liver after losing more than half of its original mass. To make this magic

a bit closer to reality, I'm investigating how our body can heal wounds

and build tissue through instructions from the immune system.

From a scrape on your knee to that annoying sinus infection, our immune system defends our body

from danger. I'm an immunologist, and by using what I know about our body's defense system,

I was able to identify key players in our fight to build back our cuts and bruises.

When looking at materials that are currently being tested for their abilities to help regrow muscle,

our team noticed that after treating an injured muscle with these materials,

there was a large number of immune cells

in that material and the surrounding muscle. So in this case, instead of the immune cells

rushing off toward infection to fight bacteria, they're rushing toward an injury. I discovered a specific

type of immune cell, the helper T-cell, was present inside that material that I implanted

and absolutely critical for wound healing.

...