Some discoveries seem small at first glance until you realize that they can change the entire history of medicine and that was exactly what a group of scientists from Texas, A&M, has just done, identifying a single protein capable of regenerating an entire finger joint on its own.

An advance so improbable that it begins to bring some closer to the almost mythical capacity of salamanders, the starting point is an alarming figure, today more than 2 million Americans live with amputations and that total could triple by 2060 thanks to the advance of diabetes and vascular diseases.

Medicine has been trying for decades to understand why some animals regenerate complete limbs, while humans are limited to recovering at most the tip of a finger and only in rare cases, something was missing, an essential biological signal, a key and now that piece could have a name, FGF8.

The team from the Texas College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences implanted different proteins from the FGF family, fibroplast growth factors that are normally not recovered, and discovered that among all of them, only FGF8 was able to do something extraordinary, regenerate an entire joint, articular cartilage, tendons, ligaments, five types of tissue. built from a single biological order.

Dr. Lindsay Dawson explains that normally these cells would do what they do in any trauma, they would form scars quickly, but under the effect of FGF8 they change their behavior, receive different instructions and begin to reconstruct complex structures as if they were following a biological engineering theme.

It is true that the regeneration was not yet perfect, the nail, for example, did not reappear, but that does not diminish the impact of the result, it represents a proof of concept so powerful that it could redefine the path to regenerate not only fingers, but arms, legs and any limb in the future.