The field of regenerative medicine has wide open potential to target multiple systems in the body, with the delivery of cells and molecules to promote repair and regeneration, depicted here in this abstracted illustration.
This blog is part of the third annual Signals blog carnival, in which multiple bloggers write about one topic that are then posted simultaneously, exposing readers to a variety of perspectives on a single topic in a unique and interesting format. You can read about what other bloggers have to say about this topic by clicking here.
This year’s blog carnival poses the question: Has the regenerative medicine industry come of age? Based on my experience in a regenerative medicine academic lab, I want to discuss some of the components that drive the industry, particularly the research.
One way to predict the future is to look at the past. According to Sampogna et al, the term “regenerative medicine” was first published in a journal article by Leland Kaiser in 1992, but humans have known about the natural phenomenon of regeneration for centuries, observing it in species such as newts and salamanders that can lose and regrow entire limbs.
In the last few decades, as the field has moved from the fringes and firmly into the spotlight, many words have been used to describe it – “emerging,” “novel,” “potential.” However, within the last five years or so, I believe there has been a shift in the language away from these words to more concrete descriptors as many technologies, once only proposed on paper, now demonstrate efficacy.
Another sign of the shift towards the establishment of the field is the increase in conferences dedicated to regenerative medicine. A couple of decades ago there may have only been a single symposium within a conference, whereas now we are seeing an explosion of Canadian and international regenerative medicine and stem cell conferences, including ISSCR, ISCT, Till and McCulloch, and TERMIS. For the remainder of 2018 alone, ISSCR lists 17 conferences and meetings relevent to regenerative medicine.
What about the progress of the research conducted under the umbrella term of regenerative medicine?
The journal Nature defines regenerative medicine as including “methods to regrow, repair or replace damaged or diseased cells, organs or tissues.” This definition includes a huge number of research areas such as organoids, gene therapy and cell delivery.
Regenerative medicine is special because it pulls together researchers from so many different fields: biologists, chemists, engineers and clinicians. This diversity requires an immense level of communication, and although we have made amazing progress in some areas, many therapeutics only work in animal models and still fail to reach clinical trials.
In addition, many regenerative medicine strategies, such as cell transplantation, are prohibitively expensive to test clinically. This ongoing disconnect between experimental lab findings and clinical successes is a major issue that will need to be addressed to move the research, and thus the industry, forward.
In particular, and in my experience, fundamental research labs should have increased communication with application-minded research labs (think a lab studying a single molecular pathway involved in regeneration versus research into delivering therapeutics to repair a specific organ). Knowing the basic molecular and cellular underpinnings of regeneration will be key to creating and improving current applications, but these types of findings do not always get the recognition needed to bring them to the attention of researchers in other areas. Increasing the exposure of fundamental and applied research labs to one another and promoting the continued collaboration of researchers with different expertise will be necessary to move regenerative medicine forward as an industry.
It can be tempting to be overly optimistic about the future when one is close to the research; the end goal is to progress knowledge in the field, but scientists must always resist the temptation for hyperbole.
With that being said, recently I was excited to hear of an interesting milestone that coincides nicely with the timing of this blog carnival. Takahashi and colleagues at Kyoto University recently announced the start of the first-of-its-kind clinical trial for transplantation of reprogrammed adult stem cells into Parkinson’s patients.
Patient recruitment is just beginning now, so we will have to wait many years to learn if this strategy is successful, but there are currently over 1000 open clinical trials listed for other stem cell-based trials. The fact that these types of clinical trials are becoming more prevalent demonstrates that regenerative medicine is transitioning from an emerging field into a successful industry, albeit with a few growing pains.
Samantha Payne
Latest posts by Samantha Payne (see all)
- Growing pains for the regenerative medicine industry - August 29, 2018
- It’s electrifying! Cell reprogramming using electromagnetic fields - May 24, 2018
- Adapting the language of computers for regenerative medicine - February 16, 2018
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