Tissue Engineering

Tissue Engineering: A New Era of
Regenerative Medicine

The lack of tissue and organs available for transplantation, as well as the pro¬blems associated with their transplantation such as donor site morbidity, immune rejection, and pathogen transfer, led to the emergence of the discipline of tis¬sue engineering. The ultimate goal of tissue engineering as a treatment concept is to replace and even recover the anatomic structures and functions of the damaged, injured, or missing tissue and organs .

Tissue engineering is an advanced stage of biomaterials science as well. The big improvement of tissue engineering from traditional biomateri¬als science is that tissue engineering is the combination of both artificial compo¬nents ( i.e. biomaterials) and biological components ( i.e. cells, tissues, and biomolecules) to create analogues of normal tissue and organs. In contrast, tra¬ditional biomaterial science uses only artificial constructs to replace part of the normal functions of tissue and organs, rather than their anatomical structures. Therefore, tissue engineering requires various components including:

- regenera¬tion-component cells.
- carriers or support scaffolds.
- growth factors.
-dy¬namic forces.

Tissue engineering as a discipline is very young and still in the early de-velopmental stage. As such, there are lots of unknown mechanisms left to be investigated in this field. For instance, before attempting to grow any fully functional normal tissue in vitro or ex vivo:

- the precise mechanisms of normal tissue formation must be well understood.
-the appropriate physical, mechanical, chemical, and biological cues in normal tissue formation are cur¬rently far from understood.
-So do the knowledge on the environmental cues in engineering the functional tissue.