What is regenerative medicine?
"Regenerative medicine is a medical treatment that uses the patient's own cells and tissues or cells and tissues from other people that have been cultured or processed to repair or regenerate lost tissues or organs" (Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Pharmaceuticals and Food Safety Bureau). By supplementing lost functions and tissues with cells and regenerated tissues, this medical treatment aims to provide a fundamental cure, and it is expected to provide new treatments for diseases that are difficult to treat. Although there has been remarkable progress in the field of regenerative medicine in recent years, regenerative medicine is generally a highly individualized medical treatment, and there are many issues that need to be addressed before it can be widely used as a new treatment, such as therapeutic effectiveness, safety, cost, and superiority over existing treatments. In Japan, since the "Act on Ensuring the Quality, Efficacy and Safety of Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices, etc." (Act on Ensuring the Safety of Regenerative Medicine, etc.; also known as the Regenerative Medicine Act for short) came into effect in November 2014, it has become a medical treatment that must be carried out more strictly and rigorously.