Organ failure from disease or injury is a major cause of morbidity and mortality for patients. Patients have traditionally been treated with organ transplantation, or artificial support systems that function outside the body (e.g., hemodialysis), but such options suffer from donor shortages, immunocompatibility and rejection issues, and decreased quality of life. This chapter provides an overview of tissue engineering of several important organ systems, including urogenital, liver, lung, gastrointestinal, and pancreatic tissues. Each section provides an insight into the research that has been conducted in the field until now. Although many challenges remain, rapid progress has successfully translated several engineered organs into the clinical setting, while for others, major headway has been made. It is becoming more and more apparent that the future of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine is intimately intertwined and that their clinical translation relies on our increasing knowledge of biomaterials and their interaction with living cells.
The goal of tissue engineering (TE) is to engineer suitable microenvironments for the regeneration of tissues or organs. To accomplish this objective, many engineering technologies have been adopted to create well-defined three-dimensional architectures at physiologically relevant length scales. This chapter reviews microfabrication technologies that are actively employed in various TE applications, including photolithography, soft-lithography, and microfluidics. In addition, strategies to assemble microtissues into hierarchical constructs are also discussed.
This chapter will cover the three main classes of synthetic biomaterial that undergo biodegradation process in vivo and have been utilized in scaffold fabrication. These are namely bioceramics (e.g., calcium phosphate compounds), polymers (e.g., aliphatic polyesters) and biometals (e.g., magnesium alloys). For each class of biomaterials, details will be provided on the degradation mechanism and the specific factors that influence degradation, including microstructural/compositional features of the biomaterials itself, as well as environmental factors. Degradation evaluation methods will be considered including both in vitro and in vivo methodologies.
The burden of cardiovascular pathologies, such as heart failure after myocardial infarction or due to congenital heart defects, is still very high. Existing clinical therapies for these life-threatening conditions cannot regenerate and restore tissue function and provide mainly palliative treatment. This critical drawback has fueled the development of novel technologies aimed to repair or replace damaged heart tissue and correct heart defects. Such strategies, broadly termed “cardiovascular tissue engineering,” are a direct result of collaboration between researchers from various fields, such as material science, engineering, cardiovascular biology, and medicine. This chapter offers an overview of such multidisciplinary strategies, emphasizing the various concepts and major applications. The chapter could be of interest not only from an educational perspective, but also for researchers and medical professionals, offering a fresh view on novel and powerful treatment options based on tissue engineering and regeneration.
