Current Spotlight – Regenerative Medicine

Regenerative medicine is a therapy that uses living tissues or cells to restore the functions of the tissues and organs that have become dysfunctional. When organs get extensive damage or dysfunction due to injury or disease, it is extremely difficult to cure the damage with conventional medicines. Before, the treatment option was only the organ transplantation, which replaces the damaged organ with a healthy organ.

While organ transplantation can be a cure for intractable diseases, it is not a widely accessible treatment for the patients because of chronic donor shortage, immune rejection, and ethical objections. Regenerative medicine has been developed to overcome these limitations. It has potential to provide new therapies for injuries and diseases that cannot be effectively treated with conventional medicines. That’s why regenerative medicine has garnered so much attention and expectations.

Cells used for Regenerative Medicine

Various cells have been developed for regenerative medicine, such as embryonic stem (ES) cells, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and somatic stem cells.

• ES cells are derived from early embryonic cells and possess capabilities similar to fertilized eggs. They can become any type of cell in the body, opening new avenues for regenerative medicine.
• iPS cells are generated by introducing pluripotency-inducing factors into somatic cells, endowing them with the ability to differentiate into various cell types like ES cells. This property of pluripotency is utilized for regenerative medicine.
• Somatic stem cells exist in the tissues of our body. They have limited differentiation capabilities and can only differentiate into the cells in the tissue from which the somatic stem cells are collected. But they are widely used in a variety of regenerative medicine.

These cells have potential to fundamentally change the future medicine. Currently, their developments are ongoing, with continual improvements in safety and efficacy. Regenerative medicine will create new therapies through further innovations.

Challenges of Conventional “Regenerative Medicine”

Regenerative medicine is an innovative treatment that offers new possibilities for injuries and diseases that are difficult to treat with conventional medicines. However, it also faces several challenges such as extremely high costs, need for special facilities, inconsistency of the products, short shelf life, post-treatment rejection and cancer formation, which must be overcome to be widely accepted as a mainstream medicine.

Advantage of “Regeneration-Inducing Medicine™”

Regeneration-Inducing Medicine™ is a novel medicine that combines the strengths of conventional regenerative medicine and traditional compound medicine. Because it utilizes the patient’s own inner stem cells, it eliminates the risks of immune rejection and cancer formation caused by some cell therapies. Besides, because Regeneration-Inducing Medicine™ is a compound drug, which is chemically synthesized, it does not need special facilities for cell collection, culture, and storage unlike regenerative medicine. Moreover, it is manufactured more consistently, with minimal lot-to-lot variation, and it is much more stable during storage, enabling longer shelf life. Most importantly, Regeneration-Inducing Medicine™ is easy to manufacture. Thus, it will be delivered to the patients at a significantly lower cost.