Originally published in TrailblazeHERS in Sports, Issue 5 | August 31, 2026
Anya Dalal
For athletes, injuries are often seen as setbacks that require surgery, rehabilitation, and patience. But what if recovery looked completely different? What if, instead of repairing damaged tissue and spending months recovering, the body could regenerate it?
This question sits at the center of Dr. Jessica Whited’s research at Harvard University. As an Associate Professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Dr. Whited studies axolotls, salamanders native to Mexico that can regrow entire limbs after injury. During a visit to her lab, I was able to physically view this research and learn how discoveries from axolotls could potentially reshape sports medicine, rethink prosthetics, and redefine recovery from injuries, amputations, and congenital anomalies one day.
When an axolotl loses a limb, the wound closes over with a specialized layer of skin. Cells near the injury revert to an unspecialized state and begin to divide, forming a mass of progenitor cells called a blastema. The blastema receives molecular signals from both the wound covering and the local nerves to guide the limb’s reconstruction. Dr. Whited asks, “How much of regeneration is a recapitulation of development?”
Humans respond to the same injury very differently through the formation of a scar. According to Dr. Whited, however, humans may already possess cells capable of contributing to regeneration, but they likely never receive the biological instructions needed to begin the process. “It’s possible that some aspects of normal limb regeneration do happen in a human... It’s just that the cells that could create a blastema don’t get the right instructions. It might [require], for a short time, giving that local site the instructions, like some molecules that stimulate some of the pathways that we’ve uncovered that are normally active during limb regeneration.” Rather than assuming humans simply lack any regenerative potential, her lab focuses on decoding the instructions axolotls use, so scientists can eventually teach human cells to respond in a similar way.
Humans are not entirely devoid of regenerative capacity. For example, young children can regrow the tip of a finger amputated beyond the last joint, complete with nail and fingerprint, provided the wound is left to heal on its own. While it’s not as impressive as the axolotl’s routine capabilities, it is one reason why researchers believe the underlying capacity in humans has not been lost, so much as just switched off.
While full human limb regeneration remains a long-term goal, Dr. Whited believes her lab’s findings have exciting implications for athletes, particularly those who experience traumatic injuries. Young, healthy individuals who lose limbs in accidents could be among the first candidates for regenerative therapies, because nothing in their biology prevented the limb from forming correctly in the first place. “Someone who lost their limb because of an accident means that there’s no genetic reason why they wouldn’t grow a normal limb, if we could stimulate human limb regeneration,” she said.
She pointed to a second group that could benefit as well: people born with limb differences caused by mechanical events during development rather than by genetics. “When babies are in utero, the amniotic sac can sometimes break free, and if… an amniotic band gets tangled around a developing limb, it can kind of create a limb that doesn’t fully develop. It was just mechanical,” she explained. “So those people would be ideal candidates, because there was no genetic reason why their limb turned out to be different.”
Dr. Whited acknowledged that any future therapy, however, must prioritize safety. “In the beginning, all of this stuff will have to be modeled in a mouse,” Dr. Whited said. “But one thing we have to really keep our eye on is that we don’t want to promote a tumor to form, because we’re asking the cells to do similar things to what tumors do, but to do it in a controlled way. So, there would be a lot of regulation, but still some risk.”
Regeneration requires cells to divide rapidly and repeatedly, which is a process that resembles what cancer cells do. Therefore, researchers must ensure regeneration occurs in a tightly controlled way. “If you have a tumor cell, sometimes those can just keep dividing forever, like you might have heard of HeLa cells, [in a] book about Henrietta Lacks,” she said, referring to the cells taken from Henrietta Lacks’s cervical tumor in 1951, which are still growing in laboratories around the world today. Because of these concerns, Dr. Whited expects future treatments to focus on delivering temporary biological signals to injured tissue rather than permanently editing a person’s DNA.
Although restoring an entire human limb is likely decades away, the lessons scientists are learning today could have more immediate applications. A better understanding of how regeneration is controlled could improve wound healing, reduce scarring, help repair damaged nerves, and accelerate recovery after orthopedic injuries. Even modest advances in those areas could significantly impact athletes recovering from ACL tears, fractures, tendon injuries, and subsequent operations.
For Paralympic athletes, regenerative medicine would complement rather than replace the advances already being made in prosthetic technology. Dr. Whited explained that athletes who lose limbs to traumatic injury or to illnesses such as sepsis may someday have the option of regenerating biological tissue instead of relying solely on a prosthetic device. This work is especially meaningful to Dr. Whited and is the impetus to her pursuit of research in this field, as her own grandfather underwent an amputation as a result of complications from diabetes. While prosthetics continue to become lighter, faster, and more sophisticated, regenerative biology offers a fundamentally different vision of the future: restoring the body’s own anatomy.
Beyond the science, one of the most inspiring parts of our conversation focused on Dr. Whited’s journey as a woman leading a groundbreaking research lab. Her advice to other young women and athletes interested in pursuing careers in STEM was to focus less on comparing themselves to others and more on defining success on their own terms: “Figure out what the most important things are to you in your life, and make sure to execute on those things, because some of them have a time window that you can’t get back… and remember that it’s your own success. You don’t need to compare yourself to everybody else, because they have their own time frames for accomplishing certain things.” Reflecting on balancing an ambitious scientific career with raising her family, she emphasized that there is no single “correct” path. Instead, she believes women should identify what matters most to them, pursue it wholeheartedly, and remember that careers, and lives, can take many successful forms.
Walking through Dr. Whited’s lab, surrounded by hundreds of axolotls, I became even more curious about how such scientific breakthroughs can make what seems impossible, possible. While today’s athletes rely on surgery, rehabilitation, and increasingly advanced prosthetics, tomorrow’s may benefit from the body’s own ability to regenerate. That future is still unfolding, and thanks to researchers like Dr. Jessica Whited, each discovery brings it one step closer!
Image Credit: https://hscrb.harvard.edu/labs/whited-lab/