American Association of Anatomists meeting on regenerative medicine.

Several years ago, the American Association of Anatomists (AAA) launched an innovative mini-meeting format as part of their annual meeting. The AAA continued this tradition by sponsoring a 2-day mini-symposium as a part of its meeting at FASEB Experimental Biology, 2006 in San Francisco, CA, USA. This year, the mini-symposium was focused on the promising and rapidly developing field of 'regenerative medicine'. The mini-symposium on 'regenerative medicine' included four separate but thematically integrated sessions: stem cells for regenerative medicine; biomimetic matrices for regenerative medicine; endothelial-mesenchymal transformation in cardiovascular regenerative medicine; and tissue engineering technologies for regenerative medicine. The goal of these sessions was to identify progress and highlight new trends and directions in the evolving field of regenerative medicine. It was an exciting 2-day mini-symposium that reviewed the differential potential of embryonic and adult stem cells, their role in tissue turnover and possible applications in tissue regeneration; identified important evolving basic science issues, such as the role of endothelial-mesenchymal transformation and stem cell recruitment in cardiovascular regenerative medicine; and, finally, clearly demonstrated how understanding basic scientific principles can be translated into novel cell therapeutics and tissue engineering modalities. The workshop also demonstrated the multidisciplinary (speakers included stem cell and developmental biologists, chemical engineers, tissue engineers, biophysicists, mathematicians and surgeons) and international (speakers represented US, Japan, Canada, Switzerland and Korea) character of ongoing efforts in the area of regenerative medicine and stem cell biology, impressive progress in this field, and confirmed the strong potential for clinical translation of emerging regenerative medicine technologies.