The Human Repair System

The Human Repair System

By Christian Drapeau

Have you ever wondered what happens when you cut or burn your 
skin, break a bone or have a heart attack? How does the body repair 
itself?
When considering skin repair for example, the conventional view is that skin 
cells called fibroblasts create an extracellular matrix made of collagen on 
which epithelial cells proliferate and migrate to reconstitute the damaged 
tissue. Although this process appears to explain the phenomenon of repair in 
small superficial injuries, it cannot account for the repair of more significant 
tissue damage. First, epithelial cells do not have the ability to differentiate 
into all the various cell types involved in the full repair of the skin, like hair 
follicles, sebaceous glands and sweat glands. Furthermore, epithelial cells or 
other cell types generally do not proliferate at a rate that can account for the 
rapid and extensive process of skin repair.

What has emerged over the past few decades, through a vast body of 
scientific literature, is that the process of repair taking place in the body 
involves bone marrow stem cells. In brief, when a tissue is subjected to an 
injury or a significant stress, stem cells originating from the bone marrow are 
called to migrate into the tissue where they proliferate and differentiate into 
cells of that tissue, thereby supporting the repair process.

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