| 1 | UF Health | What is Regenerative Medicine? | 17616 | 257 | 13 | 60.7 | positive | 2:30 | Regenerative medicine is the use of various biological factors, including particularly cells and genes, to help repair, rescue, and ultimately regenerate various organs and tissues in the body, so that we can combat the opposite of regenerative medicine, which is degenerative disease. So often with a variety of circumstances, often with aging, many of the organs and systems of the body begin to degenerate, and unfortunately we have no medical therapy for several of those kinds of degenerative diseases. The technologies and methods used in regenerative medicine include several parts. We have to obtain cells to work with, we have to grow those cells, and then we have to deliver those cells in an appropriate way, all of which are involved in what you might call the overall process of regenerative medicine therapy. And for the last 15 years and more, I and my group have been studying the cells that one can get out of the blood vessels in the fat, and these adipose derived or fat derived stem cells are particularly potent and helpful to conquer, we think, a number of degenerative diseases. One of my particular interests is to actually bring new therapies forward into patients. And thankfully we've been able to do that in some instances. We have been able to license technologies out of our laboratory over the years. And one of the technologies I'm very grateful to note has actually made its way to be helpful in about 9 million patients. So we would like to continue to work with multiple collaborators to bring new technologies and approaches forward to help with diseases in the area of degeneration using technologies of regenerative medicine. The goal of the collaborative process that the University of Florida Center for Regenerative Medicine will really live on is working together with all the multiple departments involved to address particular target disease areas that currently don't have a great medical solution. We will use approaches of cell therapy, approaches of gene therapy, and other biological tools to address those diseases, department by department, often bringing together people from various disciplines in order to work together to solve other disease processes that may learn one from the other. | ↗ |