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.