Has Insulin Cured Diabetics? No, It’s just a treatment. There is a need to regenerate islet cells or a pancreas.
Has Nitroglycerin cured cardiac problems? No, again just a treatment. There is a need to regenerate damaged and blocked cardiac tissues.
Has Steroids cured Auto immune problems? No, again just a treatment. There is a need to immune modulate at cellular level.
Been said that there are many more such examples that can be discussed to prove the need of regenerative medicine were the miracle cell called “STEM CELLS” come into picture.
Cell and cell-based therapies are being regulated by FDA in the similar ways as the drugs are regulated. But one needs to understand the difference between a drug and a cell and thus require different regulatory set of rules.
Regenerative medicine is divided into two parts called Tissue engineering where stem cells are put on to a 3D material and allowed to grow to for a tissue or organ. Where as the other part is called Cellular therapeutics where stem cells are administered in to the blood stream or to the site of injury and allow them to regenerate the damaged cells or tissues in the body.
Every second, over 15 million blood cells die and are been perfectly replaced in the human body. And this happens just because there is a master cell called Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) in an adult bone marrow which produce all blood cells. Along with this there is another master cell called Mesenchymal Stem Cell which produces other types of cells apart from blood cells in a human body.
MSC’s are pericytes which sit on every single blood vessel in our body. These pericyte, when there is an injury becomes an MSC, gets activated and then regenerate the damaged tissue. These MSC’s secrets different classes of molecules. One of them are immune modulators such as T-cells, B-cells, Dendritic cells, T-regs, etc. The other class of molecules are Trophic factors which have anti- apoptotic, anti-scarring, angiogenic, mitotic properties.
Keeping all the above things in mind, MSC (Mesenchymal stem cells) are called as medicinal signalling cells.
