Tissue Engineered Scaffolds for an Effective Healing and Regeneration: Reviewing Orthotopic Studies

Abstract

It is commonly stated that tissue engineering is the most promising approach to treat or replace failing tissues/organs. For this aim, a specific strategy should be planned including proper selection of biomaterials, fabrication techniques, cell lines, and signaling cues. A great effort has been pursued to develop suitable scaffolds for the restoration of a variety of tissues and a huge number of protocols ranging from in vitro to in vivo studies, the latter further differentiating into several procedures depending on the type of implantation (i.e., subcutaneous or orthotopic) and the model adopted (i.e., animal or human), have been developed. All together, the published reports demonstrate that the proposed tissue engineering approaches spread toward multiple directions. The critical review of this scenario might suggest, at the same time, that a limited number of studies gave a real improvement to the field, especially referring to in vivo investigations. In this regard, the present paper aims to review the results of in vivo tissue engineering experimentations, focusing on the role of the scaffold and its specificity with respect to the tissue to be regenerated, in order to verify whether an extracellular matrix-like device, as usually stated, could promote an expected positive outcome.

A novel scale‐down cell culture and imaging design for the mechanistic insight of cell colonisation within porous substrate

“…air, food and liquids), represents a challenge, especially in the absence of sufficient mechanistic understandings (Baiguera et al. , ; De Kemp et al. , ).…”

“…A great expectation, for instance, is to manufacture fully functional tissues or organs to overcome the current limitations related to the shortage of donated tissues or organs, incompatibility problems, and the detrimental effects of long‐term use of immunosuppressive drugs after transplantation (Baiguera et al. , ). This objective is still hard to achieve due to the following translational challenges.…”

“…Second, a great amount of research efforts have been pursued to develop a huge number of three‐dimensional (3D) biomatrices, media and tissue culture protocols for the manufacturing of specific tissues or organs, while no gold standard or generic procedure has been established (Baiguera et al. , ; De Kemp et al. , ).…”

Mechanistic Insights of Cells in Porous Scaffolds via Integrated Culture Technologies

“…Since the first report of this research field over 30 years ago [4], dramatic advances and developments have been made. However, it is still a challenge task to manufacture fully functional tissues [1,5,6]. This is mainly due to several translational challenges.…”

“…First of all, the mechanistic understanding of the relationships among molecules, cells, tissues and organs as a whole during tissue regeneration is somewhat limited [3,7], even though the recognition and incorporation of these relationships and the underpinning biological processes is an inherent characteristic of TE [3,6]. Secondly, there is no gold standard or generic procedure for tissue culture as a great amount of research efforts have been pursued to develop diverse 3D (three-dimensional) scaffolds, media and tissue culturing protocols [5,7]. Thirdly, significant scale-up challenges still exist in TE [6], and new scale-up strategies based on thorough investigation of the infiltrated cells within the heterogeneous and anisotropic 3D scaffolds are urgently needed.…”