Tissue Engineering
Tissue engineering’s aim is to assemble functional constructs that restore, maintain, or
improve damaged tissues or whole organs. One of the first to be approved by the FDA was artificial
skin and cartilage with limited use in human patients.
Tissue engineering evolved from the field of biomaterials development and refers to the
practice of combining scaffolds, cells, and biologically active molecules into functional tissues.
Implanting tissues is still an experimental and costly procedure and we can say that
currently, tissue engineering plays a relatively small role in patient treatment.
There are skin grafts, cartilage, supplemental bladders, small arteries, and even a full
trachea implanted in patients. Although complex organ tissues such as the heart, liver, and lung
tissue have been successfully recreated in the lab, they are a long way from being completely
reproducible and ready to be implanted into a patient. Nonetheless, these tissues can be valuable
for other purposes. In research, particularly for drug development, using functioning human tissues
can help when screening medication candidates, it could as well speed up development and provide
key tools for facilitating personalized medicine while saving money and reducing the number of
animals used for research.
Tissue engineering gives new hope for a bum knee. As we all get older, our cartilage
diminishes. A lot of athletes lose their cartilage from wear and tear, so in order to have a healthier
life, we need to undergo surgery. Up until now, cartilage has been very difficult, if not impossible,
to repair due to the fact that cartilage lacks a blood supply to promote regeneration. There has been
a 50% long-term success rate using micro-fracture surgery in young adults. A biological gel was
developed that can be injected into a cartilage defect following micro-fracture surgery in order to
create an environment that enables regeneration. Along with this biological gel and in order for it
to stay within the knee, a new biological adhesive was developed that is able to bond to both the
gel as well as the damaged cartilage in the knee, keeping the newly regrown cartilage in place.
References:
https://www.nibib.nih.gov/science-education/science-topics/tissue-engineering-and-regenerativemedicine