In this article i will present the principles of REGENERATIVE MEDICINE.
Regenerative Medicine is the process of creating living, funtional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. for exemple:
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the shortage of organs available for donation
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organ transplant rejection
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Chemical Engineering
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Molecular Biology
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Biochemistry
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Genomics
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Proteomics
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Nanotechnology
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Physiology
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Drug Delivery
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Materials Science
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Developmental Biology
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Medicine
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Bioengineering
It also has two methods of approach:
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in vivo approach: studies performed inside the living body
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in vitro approach: therapy studied inside the laboratory implanted in the body
and both are of cours for clinical use.
Regerative medicine also means cell therapy and tissue engineering.
Cell therapy helps to provide a source of missing cells and manipulates cells to produce a missing substance.
The transplanted cells can be:
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Mature, functional cells
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Modified human cells
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Transdifferentiated own patient’s cells
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Non-human cells (xenotransplantation)
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Stem cells (autologous or allogeneic)
Stem Cells are self-renewing, undifferentiated, multipotent cells. Also we have two sources for them: Embrionic stem cells (Derived from embryonic blastocysts) which are pluripotent, and adult Stem Cells (Residue within adult tissues) which are multipotent.
Cell therapy challenges:
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Directing cells to the proper place
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Integrating cells with the patient’s own tissue
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Overcoming the phenomenon of tissue rejection
Continuing tissue engineering is “an interdisciplinary field that applies the principles of engineering and life sciences toward the development of biological substitutes that restore, maintain, or improve tissue function or a whole organ“.
Like the regenerative medicine, tissue engineering approaches:
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Biopsy
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In vitro cell expansion
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Scaffold seeding
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Static culture
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Dynamic culture
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Implantation
Scaffold allows cell attachment and migration, delivers and retains cells and biochemical factors, enables diffusion of vital cell nutrients and expressed products, exerts certain mechanical and biological influences to modify cell behaviour.
Natural biomaterials that are used are:
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collagen
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fibrin
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chitosan
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hyaluronic acid (glycosaminglycans)
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extracellular matrix
The callenge is to obtain the suitable scaffold, to control the spatial distribution of cells, the proper combination of culture conditions/growth factors to allow the construction of a vital vascularized substitute with natural tissue anatomic, mechanical and antiinflammatory functions.