My Regeneration

What cantodaysgenerationhope for fromregenerativemedicine?

Its a frontier for business, the medical profession and society. Regenerative medicine aims to shift the focus from palliative care to the development of treatments that address diabetes, Parkinsons disease, stroke and heart disease. The hope is that well live longer, healthier lives and have greater independence in old age, thereby reducing the burden on healthcare systems. Given global population demographics, this is essential: according to the World Health Organisation by 2050 there will two billion people aged 60 years and over.

Regenerative medicine already has a rich history of achievement, as illustrated in the timeline. Today, researchers and doctors are making inroads via the use of cell therapies, tissue scaffolds and growth factors; and new technologies, such as 4D bioprinting, all promising to dramatically increase the speed of progress. A number of companies present at BIO 2014, including AntiCancer Inc., RegenLab, Sanford Health, Merck, Lilly and Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson are pioneering regenerative medicine projects.

To get a better grasp of the achievements, challenges and potential of regenerative medicine, we talked to four of the worlds leading experts in the field. Heres what they told us.

Aubrey de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who founded SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

What do you think are the greatest achievements in regenerative medicine so far?

I think it would be difficult to argue against two breakthroughs published in 2006 and 2008 respectively: induced pluripotent stem cells (Shinya Yamanaka) and decellularisation of organs (Doris Taylor). Both these techniques proved to be quite easy to reproduce in other laboratories, so their potential is moving towards the clinic far more quickly than usual.

What are the biggest challenges in this research and development space? It remains highly challenging to generate sufficiently pure stem cells of a desired type to ensure safety and efficacy. Also, while the decellularisation approach is a great breakthrough, we still need to get better at reseeding a scaffold with desired cells. As a solution to the vascularisation issue that has stalled solid-organ tissue engineering for so long, a promising alternative to decellularisation is organ printing, but it still faces daunting obstacles in terms of creating sufficiently tough blood vessels.

Where do you think the field will be in 10 years? I think regenerative medicine will be at the heart of medicine for the elderly by 2024, having reached a level of sophistication that allows the genuine cure of relatively simple age-related conditions such as Parkinsons Disease and the alleviation of a wide range of aspects of age-related ill-health.

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My Regeneration