REGenableMED Special Report

Policy and regulatory perspectives on regenerative medicine

It is widely recognised that health care systems today struggle to meet the demands placed on them. Reduced government funding, moves towards greater efficiency and more complex financial and planning structures create considerable organisational overhead. Equally challenging is the requirement to respond to biomedical innovations, such as ‘precision medicine’, as these are supposed to reduce costs in the long term, and so make better use of ever-tighter resources. Regenerative medicine holds similar long-term promise, but, as the REGenableMED project shows, faces some very particular and diverse challenges in its journey to the clinic, one that includes not only clinical difficulties but also economic, regulatory and organisational ones.

This ESRC-funded project completed its three year study in July 2017 and has provided advice and analysis to different UK and international bodies, and its results will continue to do so in the future. This website provides a summary of some of the main findings and a guide to accessing online the outcomes of the research. Further information about the project and new research in the area is available from Professor Andrew Webster at the University of York.