Tissue Engineering; Current Status & Futuristic Scope

Abstract

Almost 30 years have passed since the term ‘tissue engineering’ was created to represent a new concept that focuses on the regeneration of neotissues from cells with the support of biomaterials and growth factors. This interdisciplinary engineering has attracted much attention as a new therapeutic means that may overcome the drawbacks involved in the current artificial organs and organ transplantation that have also been aiming at replacing lost or severely damaged tissues or organs. However, the tissues regenerated by tissue engineering and widely applied to patients are still minimal, including skin, bone, cartilage, capillary, and periodontal tissues. What are the reasons for such slow advances in clinical applications of tissue engineering? This article gives a brief overview of the current state of tissue engineering, covering the fundamentals and applications. The fundamentals of tissue engineering involve cell sources, scaffolds for cell expansion and differentiation, as well as carriers for growth factors. Animal and human trials are a major part of the applications. Based on these results, some critical problems to be resolved for the advances of tissue engineering are addressed from the engineering point of view, emphasizing the close collaboration between medical doctors and biomaterials scientists.

The human arthritic hip joint is a source of mesenchymal progenitor cells (MPCs) with extensive multipotent differentiation potential

“…Interestingly, MPCs isolated from easy accesible, abundant sources, such as adipose or synovial tissue, have shown to possess a potentially superior differentiation capacity compared to bone marrow-derived MPCs (BMPCs) and thus sparked great interest among clinicians and researchers [19,32]. These MPC-subpopulations, which can be harvested causing minimal donor site morbidity while offering a high yield of cells from native tissues, could lead to substantial progress in TE when combined with smart biomaterials and suitable growth factors [3,5]. Therefore, the goal of this study was to further contribute to the detection and examination of innovative and valuable sources of multipotent precursor cells.…”

“…Tissue loss as well as organ failure due to traumatic, congenital or acquired diseases pose a substantial health threat to our modern society [1][2][3]. Despite medical innovations enabling the transplantation of allogenic tissue and organs, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) there is a substantial lack in potential donors [1,4].…”

“…Despite medical innovations enabling the transplantation of allogenic tissue and organs, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) there is a substantial lack in potential donors [1,4]. Even more important constant increases in life expectancy have led to a skyrocketing of degenerative diseases which generate both severe expenses for our health care systems and a growing amount of patients that could benefit from progress in the area of regenerative medicine [2,3,5]. These challenges have led to constant new research in the field of Tissue Engineering (TE) [6,7].…”

The human arthritic hip joint is a source of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) with extensive multipotent differentiation potential

“…Tissue loss as well as organ failure due to traumatic, congenital or acquired diseases pose a substantial health threat in our modern society [1][2][3]. Despite medical innovations enabling the transplantation of allogenic tissue and organs, there is, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), a substantial lack of potential donors [1,4].…”

“…Despite medical innovations enabling the transplantation of allogenic tissue and organs, there is, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), a substantial lack of potential donors [1,4]. More importantly, constant increases in life expectancy have led to a skyrocketing of degenerative diseases which generate both extremly high expenses for our health care systems and a growing amount of patients that could benefit from progress in the area of regenerative medicine [2,3,5]. These challenges have led to constant new research in the field of Tissue Engineering (TE) [6,7].…”