Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

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Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is a research institute affiliated with Wake Forest University and located at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States. Regenerative medicine is "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells."[1] The institute opened its doors in May 2006 in an urban research downtown park in a 189,000-square-foot research building. The facility is part of the Piedmont Triad Research Park.[2][3]

Anthony Atala, M.D., is the Director of the Institute. He and many of his world class team came to North Carolina from the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Cellular Therapeutics at the Harvard Children's Hospital. Notable achievments announced at Wake Forest Institute have been the first lab-grown organ, a bladder, the artificial urinary bladder to be implanted into a human.[4] [5] and stem cells harvested from the amniotic fluid of pregnant women. These stems cells are pluripotent, meaning they can be manipulated to differentiate into various types of mature cells that make up nerve, muscle, bone, and other tissues while avoiding the problems of tumor formation and ethical concerns that are associated with embryonic stem cells.[6]