Regenerative medecine

REGENERATIVE MEDECINE

INTRO - WHAT IS REGENERATIVE MEDICINE?

Regenerative medicine is a branch of medicine that develops methods to regrow, repair or replace damaged and diseased cells, tissues or organs. This new field bring together experts in biology chemistry computer science engineering genetics medicine robotics and other fields to find solutions to some of the most challenging medical problems faced by human kind. It includes the use of therapeutic stem cells, tissue engineering and the production of artificial organs. This field also incorporates research on self-healing. In addition to medical application, non-therapeutic application include using tissues as biosensors to detect biological or chemical threat agent. They can regenerate damaged organ by stimulating them in situ or in lab. It also includes the stimulation of the body’s own repair mechanisms to functionally heal previously irreparable tissues or organs. To grow the functional organ, they can use cells from the patient’s own tissue. This would potentially solve the problem of shortage of organ available for donation and the problem of organ transplant rejection.

HISTORY  

The term regenerative medicine was first used in 1992 article on hospital administration by Leland KAISER. This paper deal partly with regenerative medicine. It was said that a new branch of medicine would develop and it would try to change the course of chronic disease and in many instances, would regenerate tired and failing organ systems.

The use of the term regenerative is attributed to William HASELTINE the founder of Human Genome Science. Indeed, he was the one who discovered that some cells had the potential to develop a new kind of regenerative therapy.

In June 2008 at the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, Pr Paolo Macchiarini and his team of the University of Barcelona performed the first trachea transplantation. In 2012 Pr P.Macchiarini and his team improved their implantation by transplanting a lab made trachea seeded with the patient’s own cells.

 In June 2009 SENS foundation was launched. It is a non-profit organization that researches focuses on the application of regenerative medicine to aging.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

There are three principal fields in regenerative medicine which are: tissue engineering and biomaterials, cellular therapies and medical devices and artificial organs.

In tissue engineering scaffold is injected in the body at the site where the new tissue is to be formed. It needs to have the shape of the tissue that need to be regenerated so that the scaffold can attract the cell and form the new tissue in the shape desired. Even if millions of patients have been treated with tissue engineering devices, the field is still in its beginning. This technic plays a relatively small role in patient’s treatment but it’s more useful in research in drugs development. Indeed it allows to test newly developed drugs on lab created organs. This could speed up medication development while saving money and reducing the number of animals used for research.

Stem cell is an undifferentiated cell enable to generate specialized cells by cellular differentiation and keep itself in the organism by spreading or asymmetric division. They are present in every multicellular living being and have a central role in the development of organisms and in the maintenance of integrity during life. There are 2 ways to product stem cells. They can be derived from human embryos or embryonal stem cells, from unfertilized eggs or from embryonal stem cells modified in labs. They can also be isolated from a mature cell genetically reprogramming and from mature undifferentiated cell and then grow in a laboratory.

Our body use stem cells as one way of repairing itself. If 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 others sources.

In case where organ fails the predominant clinical strategy is to transplant a replacement organ from a donor. But there are problems like donor organ’s availability, finding suitable donor organ. Indeed donors have to take immunodepressing drugs which can have side effects. So we there are many instances that require an interim strategy to support or supplement the function of the failing organ until a transplant organ is found. As a bridge to heart transplantation they invented technologies like VADs ventricular assist devices. Now scientist try to find new technologies to supplement or replace the function of other vital organ’s systems.

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