Expanding Lifetime Regenerative Capacity
Brigham and Women's Hospital
OUR MISSION
Defining and expanding the limits of tissue repair across the lifespan.
Our mission is to push the boundaries of tissue repair and enhance regenerative health across the lifespan.
RESEARCH:
Expanding Lifetime Regenerative Capacity
At Endo Lab, we study the limits of tissue repair in aging.
Biological aging is driven by the depletion of a finite regenerative reserve; aging does not simply degrade repair - it draws down this finite capacity.
While current therapeutic models focus on stimulating failing tissues to improve the output, our research program asks a more fundamental question: can a tissue's total lifetime capacity to repair itself be expanded?
By mapping the conserved mechanisms of regeneration across tissue, species and scales, and deploying engineered biomaterials to rewrite the local signaling environment, we build the frameworks necessary to expand the limits of adult regeneration.
APPROACH
We investigate the biology of tissue aging and regeneration across tissues and species by combining in vivo injury models, multi-omics, computational analysis, and engineered biomaterials.
We use this integrative framework to connect the molecular state of single cells to the repair capacity of whole tissues over a lifetime, revealing fundamental regenerative mechanisms that remain hidden within single-discipline approaches.
Ultimately, we seek to translate these discoveries into novel therapeutic strategies to genuinely expand a tissue's lifetime regenerative capacity.
REGENERATIVE CAPACITY
Adult tissues possess a strictly finite regenerative capacity, and that limit remains unquantified.
Reserve and allocation vary independently in aged tissue, and no measurement of a tissue as it stands can distinguish one from the other.
We are building the first direct measurement of lifetime regenerative capacity in solid tissue, and questioning whether it is immutable biology, or a constraint that can be genuinely expanded.
TISSUE AGING
Aged tissues respond in opposite directions. Deepening satellite cell quiescence in muscle and sustaining division in skin each expand the stem cell pool and raise regenerative output.
We question whether these represent independent tissue-specific programmes or a conserved principle governing how any tissue spends a finite regenerative reserve.
CROSS-TISSUE / SPECIES COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY
We integrate single-cell resolution to organism-scale data from experimental work and the wider body of published datasets using machine learning to find structure that holds across tissues, species, and platforms.
We map this broad biological spectrum to expose conserved mechanisms of aging and repair that remain invisible at the resolution of a single tissue.
That limb regeneration and negligible senescence exist at all is proof of principle that the ceiling on repair is not fixed by biology, and we are developing the methods to adapt those mechanisms to human tissue.
REGENERATIVE BIOMATERIALS
In collaboration with with engineering groups, we build precision biomaterials to deliver signals with defined timing and location, control the local environment, and replace lost structure.
Aging degrades the signalling a tissue receives, the conditions it repairs under, and the reserve it draws on.
We use these capabilities to lift each of those constraints, setting the conditions of repair to drive regeneration beyond the limit aging imposes.
Healthspan Biology · Lifetime Regenerative Capacity · Tissue Aging · Comparative Biology · Multi-Omics & Computation · Regenerative Biomaterials
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