REGENERATIVE MEDICINE AND TISSUE ENGINEERING

Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine constitute an emerging multidisciplinary field involving biology, medicine and engineering which is supposed to provide an outstanding contribution to improve the health and quality of life for million of people by restoring, maintaining or enhancing tissue and organ function. In regenerative medicine stem cells are playing a fundamental role: they are characterised by the ability to renew themselves through mitotic cell division and differentiating into a diverse range of specialized cell types. The two broad types of mammalian stem cells are embryonic stem cells that are found in blastocysts, and adult stem cells that are found in adult tissues. In the last few years, the use of stem cells has been proposed for tissue engineering. In conjunction with regenerative medicine it represents a new area of research aimed to restore tissues and organs which have been damaged by traumas, tumors, infective or degenerated pathologies. In the present paper, starting from the outstanding improvement of the basic knowledge recently obtained, the perspectives in this field are illustrated considering also the involved ethical issues and particular attention is paid to the financial and organizational problems which stay at the basis of the industrial development of such technologies.