Preclinical imaging methods for assessing the safety and efficacy of regenerative medicine therapies

Regenerative medicine therapies hold enormous potential for a variety of currently incurable conditions with high unmet clinical need. Most progress in this field to date has been achieved with cell-based regenerative medicine therapies, with over a thousand clinical trials performed up to 2015. However, lack of adequate safety and efficacy data is currently limiting wider uptake of these therapies. To facilitate clinical translation, non-invasive in vivo imaging technologies that enable careful evaluation and characterisation of the administered cells and their effects on host tissues are critically required to evaluate their safety and efficacy in relevant preclinical models. This article reviews the most common imaging technologies available and how they can be applied to regenerative medicine research. We cover details of how each technology works, which cell labels are most appropriate for different applications, and the value of multi-modal imaging approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of the responses to cell therapy in vivo.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  npj Regenerative Medicine

• Publication date

  2017-10-19

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s41536-017-0029-9PMID 29302362PMCID 5677988
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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