Regenerative medicine is a technique to replace or repair defective or diseased tissue or organs by in vitro design with in vivo usage. It can be considered a relatively new branch of medicine born in 1997 when Whithman DH et al. proposed to integrate platelet enriched plasma (PRP) in fibrin glue. In 1998 Marx et al. demonstrated that PRP was able to induce bone regeneration of the jaw. In the same period it was discovered that a fraction of stem cells of bone marrow origin was able to repair several mesenchymal tissues or organs.
Regenerative medicine; hematopoietic stem cells; mesenchimal cells