StemCell Therapy

1 Introduction

Regenerative medicine is characterized as the process of replenishing or restoring human cells, tissues, or organs to restore or reestablish normal function. This field holds the promise of transforming human medicine, by actually curing or treating diseases once poorly managed with conventional drugs and medical procedures.

It informally started almost 60years ago with the first successful organ transplant performed in Boston by a team led by Dr Joseph Murray, John Merrill, and J. Hartwell Harrison.1 This landmark accomplishment marked a new era in the emerging field of organ transplantation and allowed for the first time for the complete cure of a patient with end-stage organ disease.

The first effective cell therapies with bone marrow transplants followed in the late 1950s and 1960s. A team led by Dr Don Thomas was the first to treat leukemic patients with allogeneic marrow transplants in Seattle.2,3 This was later followed by Dr Robert Good in 1968, where an immunodeficient patient was successfully treated with an allogeneic bone marrow transplant from his sibling at the University of Minnesota.4

Throughout these decades, many attempts on organ transplantation, cell therapies, and gene therapy ended in failure, but this vigorous scientific and clinical interest established the basis of the first wave of successes that regenerative medicine experienced and delivered to the clinic.58

With this paradigm change in medicine, came the first challenges of organ shortage and higher demand for matching bone marrow donors. Organ shortages established a driving force for novel advancements in molecular and cell biology that opened new avenues in several areas in regenerative medicine. The fields of cell transplantation and tissue engineering were proposed as alternatives to tissue and organ shortage by de novo reconstitution of functional tissues and organs in the laboratory for transplantation, and the use of cells for therapy.

The present book you have just started to explore is an introduction for the translational and basic researcher as well as the clinician to the vast field of regenerative medicine technologies. It is the second book in a new series, Advances in Translational Medicine and presents 23 key chapters that describe in detail some of the contemporary regenerative medicine advances in different medical fields. These chapters review the state-of-the-art experimental data available from the bench, along with vital information provided by multiple clinical trials, giving a broad view of current and near future strategies to treat or cure human disease.

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Regenerative Medicine - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

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