Unimelb SciComm takeover 2026

Hello, yes, welcome back.

You are listening to Lost in Science, where we are joined by three fantastic science communication students from the University of Melbourne.

Meredith.

You want to talk about periods.

Yes, indeed, Lyndon.

I do want to talk about periods, but not in the way you might expect.

So we all know that every month the menstrual cycle occurs, and this is basically shedding of the lining of the uterus or the endometrium.

And what you might not think about or what I didn't really consider is that actually the uterus is such a highly regenerative organ because every month this lining sheds and then regrows.

I mean, in some animals it just gets reabsorbed, but in humans it gets shed and then regenerates.

So I'd never really thought about the kind of regenerative properties of this organ and there's actually some really interesting studies coming out about this so the one in particular that I was interested in showed that there's a certain molecule that menstrual cells secrete which could be used to treat osteoarthritis in particular So osteoarthritis is a disorder that happens usually in older people and particularly in women post-menopause.

So it's an inflammation of the joints and it's quite painful and debilitating.

And as I said, it's very common in women.

But this study basically showed that these molecules, which are secreted by menstrual blood cells, could be used to regenerate the cartilage and bone which is affected in this disorder, which I think is pretty bloody cool.

so amazing yeah i think so just to give you a bit more information on the study basically they took menstrual blood from three healthy donors and they used it to treat um the like cartilage cells of 10 older individuals so the the patients with osteoarthritis and these were people between 65 and i think the oldest was 85.

And the really cool thing was that they found that even in older patients whose kind of regenerative capacity with these bone cells or cartilage cells, technically, even in older patients where that regeneration is reduced, the treatment with the menstrual cells actually kind of helped them regenerate.

And yeah, so technically it's not with the cells itself.

But it's with a kind of messenger molecule that the cells produce.

It only exists in menstrual blood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's the type of molecule is called an extracellular vesicle and it's produced by a bunch of different cells.

So the current kind of gold standard for this type of molecule is from bone marrow.

But as you can imagine, that's a very invasive procedure to like extract these molecules from bone marrow, whereas menstrual blood is is very readily accessible and it's not invasive at all to collect.

So pretty much these vesicles are kind of like chemical messengers.

They're like little packages of different chemicals that can then affect other cells.