Editors: James C. Melville, Jonathan W. Shum, Simon Young, Mark E. Wong

2019

The replacement of worn or damaged body parts has been a focus of medicine for centuries. As early as the sixth century BC, Indian surgeons described techniques for nasal reconstruction utilizing pedicled flaps from the arm. Since then, significant advances, especially in the field of cell biology, heralded a shift from flaps fashioned from dissimilar tissue to the transplantation of cells capable of restoring structural defects in perhaps an early iteration of regenerative medicine.