What is regenerative medicine?
Regenerative medicine is a relatively new field of biomedicine. It deals with the healing of various diseases by regenerating non-functioning cells, tissues and organs both by the biological substitution, for example, using cultured tissue, as well as by stimulating the body's own regeneration and repair processes.
It is hoped that the new regenerative medicine approaches in the therapy of Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury or cancer. But also common diseases such as diabetes mellitus, coronary heart disease or obesity should be cured through regenerative medicine in the future. The Lifestyle medicine tries to activate regeneration processes in the body by an optimal biological environment (nutrition, physical activity and psychosocial factors) is created for it.
The principles of regenerative medicine are successfully used in stem cell transplantation for more than forty years to treat leukemia and lymphoma; in organ transplantation great progress has been achieved in general in recent years. Newer fields of regenerative medicine are the so-called 'tissue engineering' (growth of tissue and cell structures) and the 'gene therapy' (repair or replacement of defective genetic information). Regenerative medicine is one of the main research areas of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB).
Individual methods
-Electric spiders for the production of micro-fibres from which connective tissue paraphrase so-called scaffolds are created
-Growth factors and other components of the extracellular matrix that it tacked fulfil functions
-Stem cell, induced pluripotent stem cell in different biological versions, which are infused or integrated into scaffolds administered
-Mechanotransduction through the scaffold that can affect the differentiation of cells erheblichst
-Nano-medical elements various procedures based on ultra small structural elements