Fat grafting, or transferring fat from one area to another, has a long history and is a commonly performed procedure in plastic and reconstructive surgery practices. Fat has many advantages over other materials.
Cell-enriched fat grafting enables surgeons to enrich the graft with their patient’s own adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells (ADRCs). These cells are believed to promote fat graft survival by encouraging the growth of blood vessels that provide necessary oxygen and nutrients to the transplanted fat. Cell-enriched reconstructive surgery can be an option for women who seek a natural, less invasive way to reconstruct their breasts.
When injured or diseased, our bodies have the instinctive response to heal themselves. What if we understood this natural healing ability and were able to develop ways that could help the body heal better or faster when it can’t fight the fight alone?
This is the goal of Regenerative Medicine: to harness and focus the body’s own natural healing mechanisms to restore the structure and function of damaged tissues or organs and find ways to improve previously untreatable injuries and diseases.
Regenerative medicine is making great progress in the advancement of medicine. Scientists are committed to translating research into novel regenerative medicine therapies, continuing the quest to understand our bodies’ essential mechanisms to give patients and their physicians’ new tools to treat unmet medical needs.
In particular, research has been focused on harnessing the power of one’s own cells since the breakthrough discovery that adipose, or fat tissue, is an abundant source of stem and regenerative cells. Adipose tissue has become an answer to many years of searching for a readily accessible, beneficial cell source. Medical technologies are currently being developed to provide physicians with easy and fast access to a clinical grade mixture of concentrated regenerative cells for an array of clinical and cosmetic applications.