Frequently Asked Questions
Below are a list of the most common questions which people have about Regeneus and stem cell therapy in general.
Who is Regeneus?
Regeneus is a Regenerative Medicine company, who have pioneered an adipose-derived stem cell treatment. Visit our About Us page to learn more about Regeneus as a company.
What is Regenerative Medicine?
Regenerative medicine refers to innovative medical technologies that enable the body to repair, replace, restore and regenerate damaged or diseased cells, tissues or organs.
Regenerative medicine promises to extend healthy life spans and improve the quality of life by supporting and activating the body’s natural healing. It is one of the most important and promising new areas of the life sciences and has the potential to radically transform our understanding and treatment of disease.
We are constantly undergoing structural renewal by replacing molecular components of our tissues yet the human body loses effective regenerative capacities as we age.
Regenerative medicine involves bringing together stem cell physiology, knowledge of cell growth and death, stimulation of cell replacement and the factors that regulate these and the knowledge of the supporting structures between cells.
What is Cell Therapy?
Cell therapy is the use of stem cells and other regenerative cells to repair, restore and regenerate damaged or diseased cells, tissues or organs.
Despite its apparent infancy, cell-based regenerative medicine is not new. Stem cell-based therapies in the form of bone marrow transplants have been used for over 40 years for the treatment of leukaemia. Similarly epithelial stem cell-based treatments have been widely used for many years for burns and corneal disorders.
The scope of potential cell-based therapies has expanded in recent years due to major steps forward in cell research and an increased understanding of the clinical applications of adult stem cells.
What are Stem Cells?
Stem cells are the foundation cells for every organ, tissue and cell in the body. The highly specialised cells that make up these tissues originally came from an initial pool of stem cells formed shortly after fertilization. Stem cells are undifferentiated or “blank” cells that have not yet fully specialised. Stem cells are one part of the tissue repair mechanism found in all mammalian tissue types. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential either to remain a stem cell or differentiate into a specific cell type with a specialised function, such as a bone, cartilage or muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a neuron. These characteristics distinguish stem cells from other cell types. They also have the capacity to secrete various compounds that can stimulate other cells to regenerate and repair.
There are many different types of stem cells. These include embryonic stem cells that exist only at the earliest stage of embryonic development and can form all cell types of the body. There are various types of “adult” or “tissue specific” stem cells that exist in a number of different adult tissues like bone marrow and adipose (fat) tissue. It is known that different types of stem cells have different potential in regard to the cell types they can become.
What are Mesenchymal Stem Cells?
There are two types of adult stem cells – Haematopoietic Stem Cells, which form all cells found in blood and Mesenchymal Stem Cells, which give rise to a variety of other cell types including bone cells (osteocytes), cartilage cells (chondrocytes), fat cells (adipocytes), and other kinds of connective tissue cells such as those in tendons.
What is autologous?
Autologous means “obtained from the same individual”. Both the HiQCell and AdiCell procedures use the regenerative cells from the individual's adipose (fat) tissue.