Regenerative medicine: Current therapies and future directions

Abstract

Organ and tissue loss through disease and injury motivate the development of therapies that can regenerate tissues and decrease reliance on transplantations. Regenerative medicine, an interdisciplinary field that applies engineering and life science principles to promote regeneration, can potentially restore diseased and injured tissues and whole organs. Since the inception of the field several decades ago, a number of regenerative medicine therapies, including those designed for wound healing and orthopedics applications, have received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval and are now commercially available. These therapies and other regenerative medicine approaches currently being studied in preclinical and clinical settings will be covered in this review. Specifically, developments in fabricating sophisticated grafts and tissue mimics and technologies for integrating grafts with host vasculature will be discussed. Enhancing the intrinsic regenerative capacity of the host by altering its environment, whether with cell injections or immune modulation, will be addressed, as well as methods for exploiting recently developed cell sources. Finally, we propose directions for current and future regenerative medicine therapies.