Dawns A New Era: Regenerative Medicine for Degenerative Disease

Dawns A New Era: Regenerative Medicine for Degenerative Disease

Could breakthrough innovation in ‘Regenerative Medicine’ significantly reduce the need of expensive lifelong medications, or even make the use of some important medical devices less relevant, or even help avoiding expensive and risky surgical interventions? The common answer to these critical questions is now getting clearer, in tandem with the rapid progress of the science of ‘Regenerative Medicine.’

On June 13, 2017, Nature Biomedical Engineering published an interesting an articletitled, “3D-printed vascular networks direct therapeutic angiogenesis in ischemia.” In simple words, these 3D-Printed patches are going to usher in a highly innovative way to treat ischemic diseases, in the future. As the researchers highlighted, arterial bypass grafts are currently considered as the gold standard for the treatment of end-stage ischemic disease, though many patients are unable to tolerate the cardiovascular stress of arterial surgery. The researchers found that implantation of 3D-printed grafts containing endothelial-cell-lined lumens, induces spontaneous and geometrically guided generation of collateral circulation in ischemic settings.

In rodent models of hind limb ischemia and myocardial infarction, these scientists successfully demonstrated that the vascular patches rescue perfusion of distal tissues, preventing capillary loss, muscle atrophy and loss of function.

In this article, I shall deliberate on the importance of this discovery, and its overall future implications on a broader perspective.

Regenerative medicine:

Here comes the basic question – What is ‘Regenerative Medicine’?

It is defined as a highly innovative branch of medicine that develops implementable methods to regrow, repair or replace damaged or diseased cells, organs or tissues. According to RegerativeMedicine.net following are illustrations of some conditions or diseases that regenerative medicine has the potential to cure, and what their current state of treatment looks like in in the American perspective:

• Heart valves- 250,000 patients receive heart valves, at a cost of US$27 billion annually
• Heart disease and Stroke- 950,00 people die of heart disease or stroke, at a cost of US$ 351 billion annually
• Diabetes- 17 million patients have diabetes, at a cost of US$ 132 billion annually

I discussed in this blog, the subject of ‘3D Printing in health care’ on January 11, 2016. Hence, won’t dwell on that subject here

Ischemia, and the relevance of the above discovery:

Ischemia, as many would know, is a condition that restricts adequate flow of blood in some parts of our body, which over a period, may narrow, harden or even block the important blood vessels, much often resulting in stroke, heart attack or other related life-threatening vascular disorders....continue reading….