My name is Tatsuya Shimizu of Tokyo Women’s Medical University and I am the President of the 21st Congress of the Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine (JSRM). The Congress will be held from Thursday, March 17th to Saturday, March 19th, 2022, at Pacifico Yokohama.

The theme of the Congress is "Fly, Regenerative medicine.
---Co-Creation of Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering---".
“Fly” includes two wishes. One is further development of regenerative therapy which has been already clinically applied and the other iscomplete escape from COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, co-creation of stem cell biology and tissue engineering is very important to realize future regenerative medicine, so the “co-creation” of them is focused on.

Various types of cells including iPS cells, ES cells and adult stem cells (autologous and allogenic) have been already clinically used in regenerative therapy. Designed cells with genome editing will be also used in near future. Regarding tissue engineering, material-based technologies have been widely utilized. They include 3D biodegradable scaffold usage, cell fiber technique and bioprinting. As material-free technologies, spheroid/organoid-based and cell sheet-based tissue engineering have been also developed. There are various therapeutic possibilities depending on the combination of stem cells and tissue engineering technologies. Therefore, I hope that the congress will allow participants to get information about these therapeutics and to discuss what is optimal for each disease, what is the problems, and what should be challenged.

On the other hand, these technologies are applied not only to regenerative therapy, but also to drug model fabrication including Organ-on-a-Chip. Furthermore, in recent years, the technologies are also applied to cellular agriculture represented by cultured meat production. By focusing on these new challenges, I would like to enhance the interdisciplinary activity of JSRM and encourage young researchers.

We would like to express our deepest respect to all the people in the medical field who are struggling to deal with COVID-19 every day. We will continue to prepare the congress while praying that the situation will improve and everyone will meet in Yokohama.
I will make a maximum effort so that this congress will be exciting and fruitful for all participants from academia, industry and government. I strongly hope everyone join the congress and discuss actively, and expect that the co-creation among different fields will contribute to the realization of future advanced regenerative therapy which achieve the rescue of many patients.