The Healing Foundation and the University of Manchester announced a £10 million, 25-year partnership yesterday designed to understand how some creatures can recreate their own severed limbs and to see if it is possible to enable people to do the same.

The aim is not unrealistic, said Enrique Amaya, newly appointed professor of tissue regeneration at the foundation. Human embryos in the womb, if they are operated on before six months of gestation, heal without a trace of scarring, but this ability is later lost. Humans and amphibians share as much as 85 per cent of the same genes, so it is likely that adult humans do have, in a silenced form, the genes that would enable scarless healing.

The tadpole and frog provide the means of identifying these genes. Tadpoles that are injured heal themselves invisibly within a few hours, or grow a perfect new tail in nine days, he said. Salamanders can regrow the same limb repeatedly, while some lizards have the ability to shed their tails voluntarily.

In salamanders, the clue is a group of blastema cells which have the ability to organise themselves into new limbs. “We want to find ways of creating these very specialised cells,” Professor Amaya said.

Tadpoles are well suited to the experiment because they develop outside the mother, making them easily accessible, and because they, too, lose the ability to regenerate as they turn into frogs. This means that the genes that control the process should be identifiable.

“Can you make frogs regenerate as adults?” he asked. “That is what we want to establish first. Then the next step is: can you identify mechanisms so that you get mammals to regenerate limbs like salamanders?” He said he hoped the research would lead to new treatments “within a generation”.

Professor Amaya is working alongside Mark Ferguson, whose research into wound healing has produced treatments now in clinical trials that can reduce scarring.

“The science is tractable,” Professor Ferguson said yesterday. “It would be irresponsible to think you could do it in two to three years, but the success of these drugs augurs well for going much further.”

Professor Amaya’s aim, when the genes are identified, is to develop drugs or gene therapy treatments that would activate or silence them in humans, whichever is needed. The first stage would be to encourage scarless healing; limb regeneration is much further away.

Gus McGrouther, chairman of plastic and reconstructive research at Manchester University, said the research into tissue regeneration was the next scientific step for those affected by disfigurement. “It is all a question of money and resources and research. It will eventually happen,” he said.

The study was welcomed by Paul Kelly, who fell into an industrial cement mixer 3½ years ago, losing one leg below the knee and severing his left hand at the wrist. Mr Kelly, 50, from Chorley near Preston, said of the possibilities put forward by Professor Amaya: “I am bewildered. It would have impacted enormously on my accident. I think it is absolutely amazing.”

Olivia Giles, 40, from Edinburgh, a quadruple amputee who lost her limbs to meningococcal septicaemia, said she was following the study closely. “I think it is really exciting and optimistic. You only need to look at my stumps to see why I am excited about it,” she said.

TWIST IN THE TAIL

Creatures that can grow new limbs, or heal injuries seamlessly, include:

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