Anti-Aging Regenerative Medicine
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. Regenerative medicine is a broad definition for innovative medical therapies that will enable the body to repair, replace, restore and regenerate damaged or diseased cells, tissues and organs. Regenerative medicine promises to extend healthy life spans and improve the quality of life by supporting and activating the body s natural healing. This broad field encompasses a variety of research areas including cell therapy, tissue engineering, biomaterials engineering, growth factors (induction of regeneration by biologically active molecules) and transplantation science.
In a broad sense, regenerative medicine includes rehabilitation or training for recovery of physical functions; the use of artificial hands, legs, joints and organs; 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. Scientists worldwide are engaged in research activities that may enable repair of damaged heart muscle after a heart attack, replacement of skin for burn victims, restoration of movement after spinal cord injury and regeneration of pancreatic tissue to produce insulin for people with diabetes. 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. Regenerative medicine is a medical specialty that applies advanced biomedical technologies for the purposes of renewing body tissues with the goal of maintaining the human body in normal-to-peak function for a prolonged period of time. Some of the most promising aspects of anti-aging 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.
Therapeutic regenerative repair encompasses the converging triad of rejuvenation, regeneration or replacement strategies — the so called R3 paradigm — that rely on self-healing processes, stem cell regeneration, and/or organ transplantation. Natural healing or rejuvenation exemplify inherent, baseline repair secured by tissue self-renewal and de novo cell biogenesis, particularly effective in organs with a high endogenous reparative capacity. Transplant medicine exploits the replacement strategy as a valuable option to recycle used parts and restore failing organ function by means of exogenous substitutes it is, however, limited by donor shortage. Stem cell-based regeneration (stem cell engraftment) offers the next frontier of medical therapy through delivery of essentially unlimited pools of autologous or allogeneic, naive or modified, progenitor cells to achieve structural and functional repair. Translation into clinical applications requires the establishment of a regenerative medicine community of practice capable to bridge discovery with personalized treatment solutions. Indeed, this multidisciplinary specialized workforce will be capable to integrate the new science of embryology, immunology, and stem cell biology into bioinformatics and network medicine platforms, ensuring implementation of therapeutic repair strategies into individualized disease management algorithms.
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