Regenerative Medicine in Society

Full course description

years, as well as propaedeutic to the longitudinal lines of the overall Bachelor. The course will give the students an idea of the scope of the field and the wide range of possible applications.rd and 3ndThe objectives of the course "Regenerative Medicine in Society" are to introduce students to classic and novel concepts at the base of strategies to regenerate tissues and organs. In this course, students will learn more about the broad definition of Regenerative Medicine (RM) and its application areas with an emphasis on translation and valorization. The content will focus on the history, current practice and challenges in the RM field as illustrated by the R3-paradigm: replacement, regeneration, and rejuvenation, which constitute the general strategy triad in RM. These three strategies can be employed to achieve the central goal in RM, namely tissue or organ repair. In addition, this course aims to provide the basic knowledge for the more advanced courses of the Bachelor progamme of 2

The historical development of RM will be illustrated based on these three strategies from several medical specialties. Each week of the course will focus on another medical specialty (application). A clinician or researcher specialized in the field will introduce the topic and provide historical RM examples from their respective fields. In addition, ethics of regenerative medicine applications will be discussed in the final lecture, where an open debate with the students will be also stimulated to assess their understanding of the learning objectives and provide further input on the RM cases dealt with in the lectures and tutorials.

We foresee to have additional educational material in the form of video lectures on topics that are instrumental to understand the fundamental principles of regenerative medicine and that will help the students to better understand the lectures and to get prepared for the tutorials. The additional educational material will be a way to further refresh more basic concepts seen in previous courses, yet placed in the application perspective now, namely briefly overviewing cell sources and cell nutrition, the biomaterial classes used to fabricate scaffolds, the processing technologies used for fabrication. Different applications will be further introduced as case studies and RM solutions proposed and discussed by the students in the tutorials (2 tutorials per case study, thus providing a first intake brainstorming case and a second solution case), spanning from neural to organ regeneration.