8-4.3.3. Cell therapies:

The role of stem cell therapy offers a huge potential to treat many human diseases. However to meet the various challenges, the following are essential;

• Fundamental understanding of the intricate biology of the stem cell growth and differentiation.
  
  
• Understanding the regulatory cascade of the signal transduction pathways. This would enable the switching on and off the subset of regulatory genes for ensuring selective stem cell growth and differentiation.

8-4.3.4. Regenerative medicine

There is a corresponding increase in the incidence of non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular diseases and cancers, in part due to an increasing older population in industrial societies that are vulnerable to age related DNA damage and cell degeneration.

Regenerative medicine is method to develop a functional tissue which can repair the tissue or organ which has lost its function due to any damage or disease or age or congenital disorder.

Since, now it is possible to grow some organs in the laboratory through tissue culture approach, regenerative medicine has the potential to solve the problem of many patients who require life-saving organ or tissue transplantations.

Deriving benefits of the biotechnological and medical advances of the last century, we can only expect many novel treatment options for chronic human diseases with innovations like cell therapies, new molecular entities (protein therapies and gene therapies) and small molecules e.g. nano-molecule mediated therapy.

Gene therapy based regenerative medicine involves direct delivery of the therapeutic gene to the patient or genetic modification of embryonic stem cells or differentiated cells or adult stem cells and later reintroduced into the patient body. One of the successes of this application is the gene therapy of hematopoietic cells of the patient having congenital immunodeficiency disorder.

Figure 8-4.3.4: Applications of gene therapy in regenerative medicine by direct delivery and cell based delivery. (Adapted and modified from :

http://stemgenex.com/blog/stemcellgenetherapytorevolutionizemedicine.html)