Spare Parts

Regenerative medicine is the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to damage, disease or congenital defects. This field holds the promise of fixing damaged tissues and organs in the human body by stimulating previously irreparable organs to heal themselves or to find a way to replace them entirely. This has the potential to solve the problem of the shortage of organs available for transplant as well as overcoming the risk of organ transplant rejection. Such advances will progressively disrupt the concept of healthcare delivery in Hospitals by switching them from reactive repair shops struggling to combat the deterioration in the human body, to more of a surveillance based system, tracking changes in organ function over time and providing avoidance therapies based on stem cells and DNA manipulation, and secondly, as being a spare parts service, generating replacement human organs to order which can then be inserted, plumbed in and put to work. Such approaches will reform clinical practice and human behaviours in unimaginable ways.