Regenerative rehabilitation: a call to action.

We have battled against disease since the beginning of time. As science and technology have evolved, so have the weapons in our antidisease arsenal improved. Indeed, in the last 50 years, the sheer volume of knowledge about human biology has doubled every 8 years. This means that the foundation on which the design and delivery of healthcare is built is 1,000 times stronger at the end of our lives than at the beginning. In the next century, we will add therapies that can restore lost function to ailing tis sues and or gans to the arsenal of health-aging technologies. This “regenerative medicine” will eventually open the door to battling crippling diseases like diabetes, Parkinson, and heart failure, as well as the impacts of traumatic injury. Success in the laboratory, where all such endeavors must begin, will drive the commercial activities toward products that subsequently become available to patients. Regenerative medicine is a multidisciplinary field incorporating expertise from engineers, biologists, and chemists, to name a few. The goal of regenerative medicine is to restor e tissue and or gan function lost as a result of aging, injury, or disease. It uses a variety of tools to dive rt the default pathways of wound healing in humans, which typically result in a patchwork of scar tissue, toward pathways that recapitulate restoration of original tissue/organ architecture and function. Regenerative medicine scientists seek to harness tissue and organ regeneration that was once only possible as a fetus or newborn. We believe that rehabilitation scienc e and technology will be critical in the success of any regenerative thera py and therefore the two fields mu st pay increasingly more attention to each other. We suggest herein a variety of mechanisms for the rehabilitation community to be the enablers of regenerative therapies. Because regenerative th erapies are outc ome-driven r ather than technology-specific, the community needs to engage in this interdisci plinary cross-fertilization with an unde rstanding of the dif ferent tools that can be used to restore lost organ and tissue function. Our ability to restore damaged tissues and or gans today relies on thr ee large categories of interventional appro aches: (1) medical devices/a rtificial organs, in which tissue function is replaced with entirely synthetic constructs and machines; (2) tissue engineering an d biomaterials, in which temporary scaffolds are used to bridge lar ge tissue-gap defects; an d (3) cellular thera pies, including the transplantation of stem cells and gene tically manipulated cells for the repair of damaged or diseased tissue. The Figure illustrates the concept of vertical integration of rehabilitation and regeneration. Traditionally, regenerative medicine and rehabilitation have