Dr. Venkatesh Ponemone

The basic theory behind cell therapy was stated best by Paracelsus, a 16th-century physician who wrote: “Heart heals the heart, lung heals lung, spleen heals spleen; like cures like.” Paracelsus and many other early physicians believed that the best way to treat illness was to use living tissue to rebuild and revitalize ailing or aging tissue. Modern orthodox medicine lost sight of this method, so it now uses chemicals to interrupt or override living processes. While chemicals and drugs work only until they are broken down by the body’s metabolic processes, cell therapy has a long-term effect, because it stimulates the body’s own healing and revitalizing powers. Regenerative medicine is an emerging field that aims to repair, replace, and/or regenerate damaged tissues and organs in vivo (in the living body) by stimulating previously irreparable organs into healing themselves. Cell therapy, meaning using healthy cells or cell components to replace diseased, damaged or dead cells, is a broad umbrella term capturing many elements of treatments derived from the human body’s cells or cell constituents. Some of the better known types of treatments in this class include cells and proteins from the blood (i.e. platelets or mononuclear cells) and bone marrow, but medical science is advancing the field quickly to include using our own immune cells and fat cells in ways we couldn’t have imagined twenty years ago. Regenerative medicine holds the potential to treat previously incurable chronic diseases and conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, renal failure, osteoporosis and spinal cord injuries, to name a few. The most obvious societal benefit of regenerative medicine is the possibility of significantly reduced healthcare costs from such treatments. ..read more