How regenerative is “regenerative”? A quantitative score to benchmark therapy performance across tissues

The term “regenerative” now describes an extraordinarily broad range of therapies: advanced cell and gene therapies sit alongside off-the-shelf scaffolds, injectable biologics, and topical formulations. Yet there are no agreed criteria for what regenerative means. Assessment tools that do exist focus on single tissues and were never designed to compare different product types. As a result, regenerative labeling is largely self-assigned and often binary: a product is either regenerative or it is not. This manuscript proposes the Regenerative Potential Score (RPS), a conceptual framework to quantify how regenerative a product is within a specific tissue context. The RPS looks at three aspects of regeneration: how cells respond, how much new matrix forms, and whether the product integrates functionally in vivo. Each aspect is measured using two core assays. Results are converted to standardized effect sizes and combined into a single score. The framework anchors these numbers to negative controls and current best-practice treatments, so scores reflect real clinical differences rather than arbitrary thresholds. The goal is to provide a shared language that makes comparisons more transparent and pushes the field toward consensus-based testing standards. What is this article about? We propose a scoring system – the Regenerative Potential Score, or RPS – to help compare products that claim to repair damaged tissues. Right now, everything from stem cell injections to synthetic scaffolds gets called “regenerative,” but there is no standard way to measure whether one works better than another. What problem does it address? The word regenerative has become almost meaningless. Companies, researchers, and clinicians use it for products that range from truly transformative cell therapies to materials that simply fill space. This creates confusion for everyone: scientists cannot fairly compare their work, regulators struggle to set standards, and ultimately patients have no way to know what they are getting. How does the RPS work? The system measures three things: whether the product helps cells behave in ways that support repair, whether it leads to actual formation of new tissue structure, and whether it works when implanted into living tissue. Each product gets a score from 0 to 100 based on how it performs against two anchors – doing nothing and doing what we currently consider best practice. What does this mean? If researchers and companies adopt this kind of framework, product comparisons become more honest. Instead of binary yes/no claims, we get quantitative scores that can be challenged, replicated, and refined. This is not meant to replace safety testing or detailed biological studies – it is meant to bring more clarity to a field where “regenerative” has become too easy to claim and too hard to verify.