Advances in Research

The human body is a complex structure with the innate ability to protect, defend, repair, and heal after damage or disease. For decades, medicine has faced problems that need the evolution of standard treatments and finding a way to accelerate the regenerative capabilities of the body, which possibly would not just treat but also cure certain diseases that previously had no cure. The question researchers have pondered on is whether or not it was possible as humans to use the body's innate healing power to our advantage and clinically accelerate or modify it to upgrade the treatment of certain diseases. The answer they found was in Regenerative Medicine (RM).

Historically the term regenerative medicine was found for the first time in a paper published in 1992 by Leland Kaiser. He made a list of approaches that would impact the future of hospitals. However, it is widely believed to have been coined during a 1999 conference on Lake Como by William Haseltine in an attempt to describe a novel field of medicine that combined knowledge from subjects like cell transplant, biochemistry, nanotechnology, prosthetics biomechanics, tissue engineering, and stem cell biology.

Regenerative Medicine is a relatively new field of clinical applications and research that is focused on the development of therapies like tissue engineering and stem cell technologies to repair, regenerate or replace defective, aged, injured, diseased, or permanently damaged organs, tissues or cells in order to restore them to their normal function.

It is important to note that RM has rapidly become one of the top treatment options for acute and chronic injuries, congenital diseases, and a wide range of acute and chronic diseases. It is more than just a field of medicine involving basic replacement therapies or traditional transplantation; it applies approaches like gene therapy, reprogramming of cell types, stem cell transplantation, and the use of soluble molecules, tissue engineering, and lots more.

The review article focuses on the therapeutic effects of fibroblast growth factors (FGFs), adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs), and regulatory T cells (Tregs), and the possible role they play in tissue regeneration. They are apparently useful in the treatment of myriads of diseases expectedly having no cure.