1. Muhammad Adeel
Faiza Asghar
Amina Shakarullah
Topic: Therapuetical Potential and
Current Status/Challanges
Medical Biotechnology
Regenerative Medicine

2. Applications of Regenerative
medicines are both:
1. “Therapeutic” in which tissues are
grown invitro or in vivo and then
transplanted into patient
1. “Diagnostic” in which tissue is
made in vitro and used for testing
a. drug metabolism and uptake,
b. toxicity
c. and pathogenicity.

3. Advancement in Regenerative
medicines are based on:
Advancement in “Regenerative medicine” is along
two lines of Biomaterial research:
 to aim at cell/tissue regeneration by means of
tissue replenishment,(such as bone marrow
transplant)
 to regenerate tissues using “tissue engineering”
techniques

5. Aim of regenerative
medicines:
 Regenerative medicines are among
“next generation technologies” and aim
is to improve health and quality of life.
 These technologies will contribute to
reduce medical costs associated with
prolonged admission and visits to
hospitals and welfare costs associated
with nursing care.

6. Tissue Engineering Products
Currently available:
Tissue engineering products which are in practical use are in
field of:
 Skin and teeth
 Bone regeneration
 Cartilage
 Cardiovascular system
 Pancreas and Liver

7. Components of tissue
engineering:
Cells
Stem (adult, embryonic)
Somatic
Culture method
Signals
Differentiation
Proliferation
Drug delivery
system
SCAFFOLDS
Natural
Synthetic
vascularization

8. Current Status of
Regenerative medicines:
 The world wide market size is 17.1
billion yen and reach to 250 billion yen
by 2015
 Research in tissue engineering has a
worldwide demand, as does Japan,
which has a rapidly aging population.

9. Regenerative medicines for
skin:
Skin is comprised of two component:
Epidermis: in which the cells originated in
the inner most part move towards
outer surface gradually and then fall
off.
Dermis or inner skin: consist of
meticulously woven collagen fibers and
elastic fibers protecting lymph and
blood vessel and providing tough and
elastic texture

10. Regenerative medicines for
skin:
 The elements of skin can be lost
due to:
a. Burn injury
b. bedsores (decubitus).
 Skin has resilient capacity of
regeneration and because of the
thin tissue layer, skin rarely has
difficulties in culturing.

11. Regenerative medicines for skin:
Depending on the depth of the layers lost skin
damage can be classified as
Epidermis
loss:
•it can be cured by grafting cultured skin
having only epidermal tissues
Full-thickness
skin loss
• in emergency cases temporarily skin
cultured from other patients is grafted
that is later on replaced with patients
own skin culture

12. Regenerative
medicines for skin
Decubitus
treatment:
•a porus collagen sponge layer
coated with polymers such as
silicon on one side is used to
regenerate an artificial epidermis,
For enhancing the efficacy , the
collagen layer is immersed in bone
marrow fluid taken from the
patient to induce active tissue
regeneration.

14. Challenge in regenerative
medicine for skin:
 Regardless to it that skin regeneration is in a relatively
advanced stage both in technique and materials, but
currently available artificial skins does not include:
a. skin appendages,
b. such as sweat glands,
c. sebaceous glands and
d. hair follicles.
 Research and development for regenerating skin
containing these appendages and developing suitable
scaffold materials is needed.
 The aesthetic aspect should also be an important
consideration for new generation regenerative skins.

16. Pancreas and Liver
Pancreas: its function has two
aspects, as a part of the digestive
system secreting pancreatic juice
(digestive enzymes), as a part of
the endocrine system secreting
insulin and other hormones
(pancreatic islets)
Liver: is involved in energy
metabolism and detoxification and
other functions that are essential
to life.

17. Pancreas and Liver:
 Cells in pancreas and liver, have very
little extracellular matrix so interaction
between the cells plays a more important
role in expressing the function of cells.
 So regeneration of the liver and pancreas
as a whole using the currently available
technologies is next to impossible, to solve
this problem is to regenerate selected
minimal functional units and implant
them as a whole to effectively substitute
the organ.

18. Pancreas and Liver:
To regenerate functional units of
these organs,formation of
spheroids is attracting attention
and most actively under
development .
A spheroid is a mass of cells that are
produced using non adherent
round bottom plates and major
focus is to produce spheroids while
controlling their size and
maintaining cell functions.

19. Tissue engineering of Pancreatic Islets
will help to cure Type I diabetes

20. Pancreas and Liver:
 Our target is to regenerate the organs
with all its original functions and
adequate size. So there is need for
development of an auxiliary
biomaterials that provide a 3-
dimensional framework for initial organ
development and maintains its
structural integrity until the organ can
hold its own shape using only the cells
and extracellular substrates secreted
from them.

22. Challenges
 An essential requirement for materials
that remain in contact with living
tissues for a medium to long period of
time is that they are not harmful to
tissues and biological activities.
 The toxicity of substances implanted in
the body must be considered
differently from those taken orally.

23. Challenges
 Thus bioaffinity, or biocompatibility of
the material , is the essential element
for the development of biomaterials.
 There still remain many challenges to
be solved, such as a significant
difference in three-dimensional
structure between regenerated and
natural tissues/organs.

24. Challenges:
 Cells need provision of oxygen and
nutrient, and they have to dispose of
waste matter. In the environment
without vascular system, provision and
disposal must depend on liquid phase
dispersion, causing cell necrosis in the
core of thick cell mass.
 This problem mostly occur in
preparation of large spheroids and
culture of osteoblasts in three-
dimensional porous media.

25. Challenges:
Culture and multiplication of cells
as two-dimensional structures is
relatively straight forward, but to
develop tissues in three-
dimensional shapes retaining cell
functions is extremely difficult.