Regenerative medicine is a type of medical care to regenerate cells, tissues, or organs degeneration or loss after aging, accidents, or diseases and restore body functions. The idea of regeneration in medical care has a long history. In a broad sense, regenerative medicine includes rehabilitation or training for recovery of physical functions; the use of artificial hands, legs, and joints made from synthetic materials; and living cell transplantation such as skin transplantation, bone marrow transplantation, and organ transplantation.
When organs have been damaged, for instance, the mainstream approach was to detect the damaged organ as soon as possible and slow the progression by drug therapy or surgery. With medical advances, regenerative medicine is now applied to therapy in the form of organ transplantation. However, organ transplantation poses the challenging problems of lack of organ donors, rejection after organ transplantation, and ethical issues of transplantation of another person’s organs. High expectations have been placed on further advances in regenerative medicine, which has been studied worldwide as state-of-the-art medicine to solve these problems.
There are different types of regenerative medicine, one of which is stem cell transplantation. Stem cells have been extensively studied along with the recent developments in culture technology, molecular biology, tissue engineering, and genetic engineering, and stem cell-based regenerative medicine now draws attention as a national project. Stem cells have the ability to grow into specific cells and renew themselves in an undifferentiated state for a long time. In other words, stem cells are master cells that grow into tissues or organs. The use of the patient’s own cells to regenerate tissues or organs and restore function will overcome immunological rejection and ethical problems.
Regenerative medicine appears to be a medical treatment of unlimited potential, which maximizes the innate regenerative ability of the body. Potential treatments in regenerative medicine
- Fat injection with the use of adipose tissue-derived stem cells
- Rejuvenation therapy for wrinkles and sags
- Rhinoplasty with regenerated cartilage
- Hair regeneration
- Generation of new blood vessels
- Treatment of hematologic disorders
- Bone regeneration
- Regeneration of the heart (cardiac myocytes)
Anti-aging regenerative medicine is the health care specialty embracing cutting-edge biomedical technologies aimed at achieving benefits for both the quality and quantity of the human lifespan. Some of the most promising aspects of regenerative medicine, most notably:
- Stem cell therapeutics, technologies aiming to beneficially alter the very basic cellular sources of dysfunctions, disorders, disabilities, and diseases
- Therapeutic cloning, technologies to develop ample sources of human cells, tissues, and organs for use in acute emergency care as well as the treatment of chronic, debilitating diseases
- Genetic engineering and genomics, advancements that permit the identification and alteration of genetics to ameliorate dysfunctions, disorders, disabilities, and diseases
- Nanotechnology, deploying micro- and molecular-sized tools to manipulate human tissue biology for microsurgical repair on a gross level, as well as microscopic nano-biology for repair at the most basic cellular level
Taken collectively, the advancements offered by anti-aging and regenerative medicine to improve the quality of, and/or extend the length of, the human lifespan, are the singlemost potent emerging biomedical technologies today.
