Regenerative Medicine: What is it?
Regenerative medicine is focused on developing and applying new treatments to heal tissues and organs and restore function lost due to aging, disease, damage or defects. Unlike traditional disease management, regenerative medicine is the development of new therapies that support the body in repairing, regenerating and restoring itself to a state of well-being. Said simply, regenerative medicine therapies prompt the body to enact its own self-healing response.
Regenerative medicine is a relatively new field in medicine that involves expertise in a wide-ranging set of disciplines — from biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, genetics, medicine, robotics, and other fields — to find solutions to some of the most challenging medical problems experienced today.
The categories of tools used in regenerative medicine can be listed as:
Tissue engineering
Cellular and Gene therapies, and
Medical devices and artificial organs.
1. Tissue Engineering
Tissue engineering involves biologically compatible scaffolds and other biomaterials are implanted in the body at the site where new tissue is to be formed. The scaffold is in the shape of the tissue that needs to be generated and attracts cells such that the outcome is the body creating new tissue in the shape desired. If the newly forming tissue is subjected to exercise as it forms, the outcome can be new functional engineered issue.
2. Cellular and Gene Therapies
Our body uses stem cells as one way of repairing itself and there are many millions of adult stem cells in every human. When adult stem cells are harvested and then injected at the site of diseased or damaged tissue, reconstruction of the tissue is possible under the right circumstances. These cells can be collected from blood, fat, bone marrow, and other sources. The development and refinement in methods to prepare harvested stem cells to be injected into patients to repair diseased or damaged tissue is ongoing and constantly evolving.
Gene therapy involves the transfer of genetic material into cells to provide them with new functions. A gene transfer agent has to be safe, capable of expressing the desired gene for a sustained period of time in a sufficiently large population of cells to produce the biological effect. Natural stem cells (from embryonic, hematopoietic, mesenchymal, or adult tissues) or induced progenitor stem (iPS) cells can be modified by gene therapy for use in regenerative medicine.
3. Medical Devices and Artificial Organs
Transplantation of organs is the traditional clinical strategy when an organ fails. The availability and success of such methods depends heavily on a variety of factors. One ongoing, long-term consequence of organ transplantation is that recipient take immunosuppression drugs—which have side effects. There are technologies in various stages of maturity and development designed to facilitate organ repair or replacement as an alternative to transplantation.
Medical devices, as defined by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), refer to instruments, machines and implants used in the recovery, isolation or delivery of regenerative medicine therapy treatments.
