Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: New Trends and Directions—A Year in Review

Abstract

Tissue engineering (TE) is continuously evolving assimilating inputs from adjacent scientific areas and their technological advances, including nanotechnology developments that have been spawning the range of available options for the precise manipulation and control of cells and cellular environments. Simultaneously, with the maturation of the field, TE has a growing and marked impact in other fields, such as cancer and other diseases research, enabling tri-dimensional (3D) tumor/tissue models of increased complexity that more closely resemble living tissue dynamics, playing a decisive role in the development of new and improved therapies. Nevertheless, TE is still struggling with translational issues. On this matter, the advent of personalized and precision medicine has opened new perspectives, particularly with the striking evolutions enabled by 3D bioprinting technologies. Based on a modified methodology grounded in the past years' approach, we have identified and reviewed some of the most high-impact publications on the topics that are revolutionizing TE and helping to define the future directions of the field, namely: (1) New trends in TE: Personalized/precision regenerative medicine and 3D bioprinting, (2) Contributions of TE to other fields: microfabricated tissueengineered 3D models for cancer and other diseases research, and (3) Diagnostic and theranostic tools: monitoring and real-time control of TE systems.Keywords: 3D bioprinting, 3D disease models, nanotechnology, precision regenerative medicine, theranostic toolsThe Aim, Scope, and Methods of This Review S ince its origin, tissue engineering (TE) holds the promise of revolutionizing healthcare by providing artificially developed tissues and organs substitutes on demand. More recently, TE has expanded into different biomedical areas to feedback research and clinical needs, widening the range not only of possible successful therapies but also of diagnostic/screening tools. Considering the growing number of publications related with TE and approaching different scientific domains, such as cancer science or pharmaceutics research, the potential complementary role of the field in a multitude of clinical areas and therapies in the years to come is evident.Our review attempts to cover some of the most exciting research contributing to both regenerative medicine and in vitro research applications of engineered tissues, along with the novel technological approaches that are advancing the field. This is the fifth review of the kind in TE. The previous four articles [1][2][3][4] helped to establish the methodology adopted for selecting the areas of focus and the contributions to highlight. As in previous years, we started by searching the ISI Web of Knowledge database for articles in ''tissue engineering'' and ''regenerative medicine'' published during the period of September 2015 through December 2016, thus using a 3-month overlap with the previous review to not miss impactful articles in areas not addressed earlier.Similar to previous years, we also consid...

Human Cardiac Organoids for Disease Modeling

“…The new concept of culturing cells in 3D was triggered by the fact that cells cultured on conventional flat tissue culture flasks (2D culture) behave in a different way than their native in vivo counterparts . 2D cultures are also unable to represent the complexity of in vivo tissue dynamics, thus, do not adequately represent the physiological tissue microenvironment . The possibility of culturing cells in a 3D microenvironment mimicking the microenvironment in the native organ could reproduce more physiological‐like biological responses and further their investigation, something which can in many cases not be performed in the organ directly due to ethical concerns and/or source scarcity.…”

“…3 2D cultures are also unable to represent the complexity of in vivo tissue dynamics, thus, do not adequately represent the physiological tissue microenvironment. 4 The possibility of culturing cells in a 3D microenvironment mimicking the microenvironment in the native organ could reproduce more physiological-like biological responses and further their investigation, something which can in many cases not be performed in the organ directly due to ethical concerns and/or source scarcity. Furthermore, culturing cells in 3D, correlating their microenvironment as closely as possible to the studied human organ, could help minimize the use of expensive and labor intense animal studies.…”

Triggering the activation of Activin A type II receptor in human adipose stem cells towards tenogenic commitment using mechanomagnetic stimulation

“…13,14 MNPs-tagged cells renders magnetic responsiveness to the engineered systems with potential to be remotely controlled and tuned by the actuation of an external magnetic field stimulating cells in vitro and upon implantation. 15 Additionally, the magnetic field was shown to impact biological processes 16,17 and to render a positive outcome in tissue healing. 18,19 Thus, in this study we propose to investigate a magnetically actuated TE approach using an externally applied oscillating magnetic field over stem cells tenogenic phenotype commitment (Figure 1).…”

Do biomedical engineers dream of graphene sheets?

“…Moreover, the chemical, electrical and mechanical tunability of GBM can enhance the features of advanced TE scaffolds 71 , leading to a meticulous recreation of specific cellular microenvironments and consequently to a successful reinforcement or replacement of natural regeneration processes. Thus, graphene seems to perfectly fit into the concept of personalized medicine 72,73 , which states that, ideally, a therapeutic agent should be tailored to match the specific requirements of the patient and then delivered/implanted with precision in the target area without toxic effects.…”