18/09/2025
This is a special week, as we are combining our portrait series with the . To celebrate the staff at the institute, we have Georgios, a postdoc in Can Aztekin’s lab in the Friedrich Miescher Lab here in Tübingen, who is studying how controlling oxygen levels can prime mammalian cells for scar-free healing, much like the regenerative process seen in some amphibians.
From Sci-Fi to reality: Georgios is turning what we've only seen in movies into a real-world medical breakthrough.
My name is Georgios Tsissios, and I study wound healing and tissue regeneration. My research focuses on understanding why certain amphibians can fully restore the structure and function of lost or damaged limbs, while most mammals, including humans, heal primarily through scarring. We have discovered that environmental factors, particularly oxygen levels, play a critical role in determining healing outcomes and regenerative capacity. By reducing oxygen to subatmospheric levels, we were able to prime mammalian cells to accelerate the wound-healing process, representing an important first step toward achieving scar-free healing.
