Regenerative Medicine is the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. This field holds the promise of regenerating damaged tissues and organs in the body by stimulating previously irreparable organs to heal themselves. Regenerative medicine also empowers scientists to grow tissues and organs in the laboratory and safely implant them when the body cannot heal itself. Importantly, regenerative medicine has the potential to solve the problem of the shortage of organs available for donation compared to the number of patients that require life-saving organ transplantation, as well as solve the problem of organ transplant rejection, since the organ’s cells will match that of the patient.
Scientific research is working to make treatments available for clinical use. Treatments include both in vivo and in vitro procedures. In vivo meaning studies and trials performed inside the living body in order to stimulate previously irreparable organs to heal themselves. In vito treatments are applied to the body through implantation of a therapy studied inside the laboratory.
Anti-aging regenerative medicine refers to a group of biomedial approches to clinical therapies that may involve the use of stem cells. Examples include; the injection of stem cells or progenitor cells (cell therapies); another the induction of regeneration by biologically active molecules; and a third is transplantation of in vitro grown organs and tissues (tissue engineering).
There are four concentrations in the field of regenerative medicine:
1. Laboratory-grown organ transplant — create new body parts via therapeutic cloning (via somatic cell nuclear transfer).
2. cell therapy — There are two ideas behind the use of cells as a medical treatment. The first is to provide a source of missing cells, say to heal a tissue that is injured or to renew a population of cells that are killed off by a disease such as Alzheimer’s. The second notion is to manipulate cells to produce a missing substance, such as the protein that is missing in boys affected by Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Adult stem cells, which exist in all of us as a repair mechanism for tissues lost to trauma, disease, and wear and tear, have been studied for decades, and are already widely used to treat some conditions, such as leukemia.
3. Tissue engineering and biomaterials –The term “tissue engineering” refers to methods that promote the regrowth of cells lost to trauma or disease. Tissue engineers use many methods, including the manipulation of artificial and natural materials that provide structure and biochemical instructions to young cells as they grow into specific kinds of tissue. These materials/biomaterials are called scaffolds because they provide support and materials for tissue regrowth.
4. Medical device and artificial organ– An artificial organ is a man-made device that is implanted into, or integrated onto, a human to replace a natural organ, for the purpose of restoring a specific function or a group of related functions so the patient may return to as normal a life as possible. The replaced function doesn’t necessarily have to be related to life support, but often is. Implied by this definition is the fact that the device must not be continuously tethered to a stationary power supply, or other stationary resources, such as filters or chemical processing units. Periodic rapid recharging of batteries, refilling of chemicals, and/or cleaning/replacing of filters, would exclude a device from being called an artificial organ.
Artificial bladders represent a unique success in that these are autologous laboratory-grown living replacements (from a small sample of the patients’ own bladder tissue) known as bioartificial organ via tissue engineering technologies, as opposed to most other artificial organs which depend upon electro-mechanical contrivances, and may or may not incorporate any living tissue.
5. Clinical Translation — Clinical translation puts promising therapies into active trials.
