Fat City: Are lipids ‘liquid gold’?
Big Macs, Twinkies and Ho-Hos may be your salvation. Scientists are studying fat from liposuction procedures — “liquid gold,” as one Stanford University researcher calls it — to rebuild cartilage, muscle and bone, and as potential therapies for heart attack patients or to unlock age secrets. It’s all early-stage work. Studies have been carried out only in animals, and researchers aren’t sure if high concentrations of stem cells lumped in your love handles are the key. But the potential has created a cottage industry offering to bank fat to literally roll out again when — and if — treatments emerge. Eventually, said Dr. Michael Longaker, director of children’s surgical research at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the research could lead to bedside tissue engineering. That could involve harvesting belly fat through liposuction, inducing stem cells to create bone, for example, and returning it to a scaffold in the knee that could form new cartilage over a year or two. It’s the
