Biomaterials for endogenous regenerative medicine: Coaxing stem cell homing and beyond

Over the past two decades, an accumulating body of evidence indicates that well-designed biomaterials are able to coax the homing of resident stem cells to injured sites and orchestrate their behaviors and functions to promote tissue regeneration. This paradigm opens a new research avenue, termed endogenous regenerative medicine (ERM) in this manuscript, that takes advantage of the body's own regenerative capacity to manage a broad spectrum of ischemic and degenerative diseases. By building on the hidden regenerative potential of resident stem cells, ERM circumvents the complex processes involved in tissue engineering and thereby facilitates the development of clinically translatable regenerative approaches. In fact, tremendous progress has been achieved in the field of ERM, and a large body of literature covering both biological discoveries made in the laboratory and preclinical successes in animal models supports the notion that ERM technologies should be translated to clinical scenarios aimed at curing disease states. In this manuscript, we summarize the strategies with either demonstrated effectiveness or significant potential for harnessing stem cell homing in therapeutics with the aims of defining new criteria for biomaterial design in the field of ERM and predicting future developments in this ever-evolving and rapidly advancing arena.