regenerative medicine

Meaning

Noun

• Medicine that replaces or regenerates human cells, tissue or organs, to restore or establish normal function.

Origin

• First coinage is widely attributed (incorrectly as it turns out) to William Haseltine (founder of Human Genome Sciences). From the work of Michael Lysaght (Brown University), his team "first found the term in a 1992 article on hospital administration by Leland Kaiser. Kaiser’s paper closes with a series of short paragraphs on future technologies that will impact hospitals. One such paragraph had ‘‘Regenerative Medicine’’ as a bold print title and went on to state, ‘‘A new branch of medicine will develop that attempts to change the course of chronic disease and in many instances will regenerate tired and failing organ systems.’’