Regenerative medicine

What is Regenerative Medicine?

Regenerative medicine is an interdisciplinary field which focuses on providing safe and reliable ways to repair, restore, or replace damaged tissues or organs. The two main components of regenerative medicine are stem cell therapy and tissue engineering.

The Benefits of Regenerative Medicine

With the average age of the world’s population drastically increasing, there are pressures on the healthcare system to support patients’ desire to be active for longer. This puts a huge economic strain on healthcare providers who, due to the lifespan of many current treatments, are having to perform operations and procedures multiple times on patients in order to give them the mobility they seek.

Regenerative medicine has the ability to alleviate some of this economic pressure as it can provide patients with longer lasting solutions, reducing the need for immunosuppressant drugs, examinations and multiple operations.

The physical and psychological benefits to patients are significant. With the potential to return to the desired standard of life with a reduction in physical pain and the need for repeated follow up appointments, which can lead to stress, anxiety and a lack of confidence in physical ability.

These innovations in regenerative medicine can also benefit wider society with the potential to address a variety of incurable diseases, address the problem of organ shortage and ease economic pressures by reducing treatment costs.

What does the future of regenerative medicine look like?

According to Sharlini Sankaran, PhD, executive director of Duke’s Regeneration Next Initiative, “One day, patients will have access to regenerative medicine treatments that will circumvent the complications of organ donation. We will be able to use our bodies’ own innate repair mechanisms to eliminate the wait time, cost, and limited supply of organ transplantation. Instead of transplanting organs, we will know how to repair our own.” And this is just one of the exciting possibilities that could come out of developments in regenerative medicine.