The utmost hope for many incurable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, and injury related trauma arises from the recent development in stem cell research and stem cell therapy. It is now clear that among the three major stem cell types, adult stem cells are the most potential and safe for utilizing them as therapeutic bullets. The cue of using the adult stem cells for regenerative medicine arises from our long term understanding of body’s natural ability to repair and replace the cells and tissues of certain organs. Use of autologous hematopoietic stem cells in bone marrow transplantation for leukemia patients has become a routine practice in clinics. However, stem cell therapy for diseases involving solid tissues has not progressed so extensively and needs better understanding for clinical implementation.

Today, there is new evidence that stem cells are present in far more tissues and organs than once thought and that these cells are capable of developing into more kinds of cells than previously imagined. Tremendous efforts are now underway to harness stem cells and to take advantage of their new found capability, with the goal of devising new and more effective treatments for a host of diseases and disabilities.

In this special issue, we invite overview and original papers describing the current understanding of the plasticity of adult stem cells for stem cell therapy, preclinical validation of stem cell therapy, noninvasive imaging of stem cell therapy, disease models for stem cell therapy, and clinical trials of adult stem cell therapy.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Plasticity of adult stem cells for therapeutic measure
• Scope of stem cell therapy in various diseases
• Different models of adult stem cell therapy
• Real time monitoring of adult stem cell therapy by noninvasive imaging
• Monitoring of in vivo kinetics (biodistribution, differentiation, proliferation, survival, etc...) of adult stem cells in preclinical models
• Clinical trials of adult stem cells