Some animals can heal without scars and/or regenerate entire organs even as they age. In humans these abilities are rapidly lost past birth. The lack of suitable donor tissues and organs available for transplantation has advanced technological solutions, commonly known as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Tissue engineering evolved from the field of biomaterials development and refers to the practice of combining scaffolds, cells, and biologically active molecules into functional tissues. The goal of tissue engineering is to assemble functional constructs that restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues or whole organs. Regenerative medicine is a broader field that includes the technological concepts of tissue engineering but also incorporates research on self-healing - where the body uses its own systems, sometimes with help foreign biological material to recreate cells and rebuild tissues and organs. In this plenary lecture, I will discuss the current status of "regenerative tissue engineering and medicine", which is driven by a combination of technological and molecular advances.