{"doi":"10.33424/futurum422","title":"Can we engineer bacteria to regenerate tissues?","abstract":"If one of your organs fails or becomes damaged, the best option may be to replace it with an organ donated by someone else.However, while organ transplants are life-changing for many patients, they are also expensive, risky and in extremely high demand.At any one time in the US, about 100,000 people are on the waiting list for organ donations.If you need a new heart or lung, you will have to wait about four months, while the average waiting time for a donated kidney is five years.\"There is a need to develop new tools to repair or replace damaged organs and tissues,\" says Dr Christopher Contag, a biomedical engineer and microbiologist at Michigan State University.\"If this could be done inside the body, it would avoid some of the risks and costs of organ transplantation and remove the need for donated organs.\"Such tools could be used broadly across many organ systems, for example, to repair damaged heart tissue after a heart attack or regrow neurons to reverse the effects of Parkinson's disease.\"We propose to create engineered endosymbionts that can reprogram cells to become stem cells that, with the flip of a genetic switch in the Dr Christopher Contag, a biomedical engineer and microbiologist at Michigan State University in the US, is creating engineered endosymbionts -bacterial cells that can be delivered into cells of other organisms where they can persist and control cellular functions.Since these engineered endosymbionts have the potential to guide the regeneration of our organs and tissues, Chris hopes his work will help to rebuild tissues in patients with damaged or diseased organs.Can we engineer bacteria to regenerate tissues?","journal":null,"year":2023,"id":411176,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9604,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":20775,"name":"Christopher H. Contag","orcid":"0000-0002-1011-8278","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:21:38.940853Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}