A report of the 18th congress of the Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine

The 18th Congress of the Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine was held from March 21-23, 2019, at Kobe International Conference Center (Hyogo Prefecture) with 3,576 participants. The theme of this congress was 'Message from the Birthplace of Regenerative Medicine" with expectation of disseminating the message of 'saving patients with regenerative medicine" for the future. With this theme, this congress aimed to provide opportunity for accelerating the development of this field through exchanging infor- mation among people from all participants (including individuals from academia, various industries, and regulatory authorities). Numerous topics were covered in the one presidential lecture, one congress president's lecture, one keynote lecture, one invited lecture, three special lectures, three educational lectures, four special programs including two joint symposia with oversea society (13 topics), one award lecture program (four lectures), symposia (46 sessions, 460 topics), oral presentations (38 sessions, 219 topics), poster presentations (77 sessions, 417 topics), 32 co-organized seminars (39 talks), and the state- of-the-art technology showcase (178 organizations). Additionally, two sessions for junior high school and high school students (basic course and advanced course) were held during the conference. (C) 2019, The Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 4.0/).