Regenerative medicine has long been an unattainable dream, but with the technological advances and the audacious intellect of several scientists, this great branch of medicine opens the way to the future, developing cures and treatments against great diseases that until now have limited us with death. But this medical science does not work alone, since it joins with others such as advanced cell therapy, genetic engineering, and tissue engineering, which are the main fields that, based on the body's own self-healing, can lead to compliance with the goals proposed by this branch of current medicine.
How does this treatment work?
Cell therapy uses stem cells, embryos or specialized cells to be able to develop new tissues to replace diseased or damaged tissues, such as in bone marrow transplantation, which by replacing the diseased cells of a patient with leukemia with others of a healthy donor, offers the opportune treatment to cure the disease, therefore the opportunity to have a better lifestyle and prolong the patient's existence.
But cell therapy has not been limited to working with hematopoietic cells, but from IPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) have been able to convert these cells into neurons, cardiomyocytes, bones, etc. There have been several laboratory studies which have opened the possibility of curing several diseases such as hemophilia or Fanconi anemia, and also check the ability of these cells to generate mini organs such as the liver, brain, and kidneys, offering a future promising to procreate organs ready to be transplanted.
As for genetic engineering, it had a beginning full of failures possibly due to the lack of technology at that time, however in recent years it has evolved with great success, improving the transport of genes for the cure of various diseases, by inserting a gene into damaged cells to change or block a defective or incompetent gene, its main function and achievement is the treatment of genetic diseases such as bubble baby disease, leukodystrophy or blindness in children, the great step of this field has also allowed progress in the treatment of deadly cancer that for decades has oppressed the world.
Finally, we find tissue engineering whose main objective is to develop bioartificial organs, that is, to use artificial materials such as polymer scaffolds and living cells to build an organ capable of fulfilling the essential function of a real organ.
