Taiwan is going to become a super-aged society in 2025 officially. The sharp changes in the demographic structure have significantly increased the unmet medical needs for the care of the aging of the elderly population and disabled patients. From the perspective of global development trend, cell therapy based regenerative medicine will be the most potential solution for aging, disability and unmet medical needs in the future. In response to the “Taiwan's 2030 Science and Technology Vision” proposed by government in 2020, this program aims to promote researches exploring new therapeutic methods or strategies for future precision regenerative medicine to fulfill the unmet medical needs, as well as to foster the progress of cell therapy moving ahead to precision and industrialization.
In view of the highly heterogeneity and complexity of cell therapy, it is important to develop precision therapeutic treatment and establish evaluation platform for safety and efficacy assessment. Two major focuses of researches promoted in this program are as follows:
1. Development of the emerging regenerative medical treatment and technology
• Induced pluripotent stem cell, iPSC
• Gene-engineered or gene-modified cell
• Exosome
• Allogeneic stem cells or allogeneic immune cell
2. Establishment of evaluation platform for novel cell therapy technology
• Method for super donor assessment
• Cell preservation technology
• Method for safety assessment
• Method for efficacy assessment
Through adopting the two strategies above, this program will promote research in regenerative medicine and link basic biomedical research to clinical translational medicine. The program will strive on improving the quality of cell therapy products so that the therapeutic efficacy and treatment precision can be enhanced. And the implementation and application of cell therapy will further foster the industrialization of regenerative medicine in Taiwan. The expected performance and success of this program will facilitate the technology development of domestic cell therapy products as well as the completion of industrial supply chain, which is beneficial to promoting the domestic cell therapy industry to the international market and to the health and wellbeing of mankind at all ages.
