Regenerative Medicine Future – A Potential To Transform Healthcare
Published on: 2018/05/11
Abstract
While a vast majority of currently available treatments for chronic and fatal diseases are palliative or delay disease progression, regenerative medicine is uniquely capable of altering the underlying disease mechanism.
Although regenerative medicine is in a relatively early stage of development, a significant number of products, particularly cell therapy (CT)-based products and tissue engineered (TE) products, are already commercially available on the market.
This article provides an overview of the regenerative medicine landscape, with a particular focus on Cell Therapy products.
Interest Category
Regenerative medicine, Stemcell research, Cell therapy
What is regenerative medicine?
Regenerative medicine is the future of medical research.
The primary focus of the current clinical procedure is to treat the symptoms. The regenerative medicine aims to restore the damaged tissue or organs. The damages may be due to disease, congenital issues or trauma.
How are regenerative medicines used currently?
The regenerative medicines are currently used in :
Tissue engineering:
Tissue engineering is in its nascent stage. In this strategy, scaffolds that are biologically compatible are implanted in the body where new tissue is needed. The scaffold that is used for this purpose is in the shape of the tissue that has to be formed. As said earlier, this procedure is in a preliminary stage and offers promising studies.
Cellular therapies:
In this strategy, stem cells from adults are collected in different ways. Cord blood, bone marrow, blood, and dental pulp are some of the common methods of collecting stem cells. These stem cells are injected at the site of the damaged or diseased tissue.
Medical devices and artificial organs:
When an organ fails, it has to be replaced as per the current medical procedure. The main challenge lies in finding the donor and addressing the side effects of the medicines that are prescribed to a donor.
The time involved in finding the right donor also is a challenge and the patients have to be put under a long wait to find a replacement organ. VADs – Ventricular Assist Devices were initially used as a bridge to heart transplant. Now, VADs are used as circulatory support on a long-term. Many types of research are on for developing devices that can replace or supplement organs like heart, lung, kidney, and liver.
Regenerative medicine future:
What is regenerative medicine in stem cell research?
Stem cell research plays a major role in the future of regenerative medicine. It also spans across other areas of regenerative medicine like gene therapy, tissue engineering, and nanotechnology. Stem cell research is likely to hold a great promise for the future with respect to blood transfusion, cloning, EX, induced pluripotent cells, organoids, and genome editing.
The progress of stem cell research is a significant milestone in medical science. It is the foundation for cell-based therapies for diseases which cannot be otherwise cured by medicines.
Many diseases of the blood have been treated with stem cells including leukemia, diseases of the skin, bone or eye surface with tissue grafts.