Tissue Engineering a reality or a dream?

2009-09-11T20:39:00.000+01:00

Scientists have been trying to regenerate human tissue for over twenty years now. Have they succeeded? Well, so far, it's all in the labs and no tissue engineering product has made it into the clinic yet.

Anyway, what is Tissue Engineering?

Organ transplantation is the perfect solution for the management of organ failure. However, the availability of matching organs is limited, and jeopardised by potential immune rejection when available. Tissue Engineering offers a potential "attractive" alternative.

Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary field that provides functional substitutes for damaged tissues. These are developed using complex constructs of living cells, bioactive molecules and three dimensional scaffolds, which support cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation.

As cells proliferate, deposition of extracellular matrix components and biodegradation of the scaffold result in a solid three-dimensional (3-D) tissue construct. These constructs can be formed by seeding cells into pre-formed scaffold or through injection of a solidifiable precursor and cell mixture to the defective tissue. The latter have the advantage of being able to take the shape of the tissue defect, avoiding the need for patient-specific scaffold prefabrication. Injectable scaffolds also aid the homogenous distribution of cells and molecular signals throughout the scaffold, and allow the scaffold precursors to be injected directly into cavities, regardless of shape and size, in a minimally invasive manner.

Currently, researchers around the world are investigating the use of a wide variety of materials, natural or synthetic, for the regeneration of various human tissues. Additionally, recent progress in recombinant gene technology lead to the charachterisation and expansion of a number of therapeutic proteins for tissue engineering applications. When used together with cells, scaffolds and proteins have promoted tissue regeneration both in-vitro and in-vivo animal, and human studies.

So, tissue engineering is showing a lot of promise to solve the problem of organ and tissue failure. However, there is a long way to go before tissue engineering products are used clinically.

Romaissa's Research

Tissue Engineering a reality or a dream?