Tokyo Women's Medical University

Graduate School of Medical Science

Tissue Regeneration

About us

Although transplantation medicine is a treatment for severe diseases, the shortage of donors is a major issue, and even if transplantation is possible, the problems of side effects from immunosuppressive drugs still remain. As a solution to these problems, regenerative medicine, especially tissue engineering, is attracting attention as the medicine of the future. Tissue engineering has been proposed by Langer, an engineer, and Vacanti, a surgeon, in 1993. They demonstrated that 3D tissue structures can be regenerated by utilizing a biodegradable synthetic polymer as a scaffold, implanting cells into it, and culturing them in the existence of growth factors. In the future, the development of stem cell biology in addition to tissue engineering will synchronize to establish the field of regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is an interdisciplinary field that can never be realized by medicine or engineering solely. The field of regenerative medicine and engineering is a fusion of medicine, science and engineering, and biology to create new concepts and methods for the future of medicine.

Research

(1) Technical development of isolation/differentiation/amplification of stem cells
(2) Regenerative therapy with cell sheet engineering
(3) Development of new regenerative treatment using mesenchymal stem cell sheet
(4) Research on capillary and lymphatic vessel regeneration using cell sheets
(5) Pancreas regeneration using cell sheet engineering
(6) Applying regenerative medicine for refractory diseases by using MSCs

Faculty

Masayuki YAMATO
Ryo TAKAGI
Jun HOMMA

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