Designing in vivo bioreactors for soft tissue engineering

Abstract

Tissue engineering emerged in the early 1990s to address limitations in organ transplantation and synthetic tissue replacements, focusing on coupling cells and a biocompatible matrix known as a scaffold. Some clinical success has been achieved to date; primarily with hard or avascular tissue replacements (e.g., bone and cartilage replacements) and two-dimensional soft tissues (e.g., skin and cornea). The reconstruction of more complicated three-dimensional soft tissues (e.g., cardiovascular, adipose tissues) is far more challenging. Here the commonly taken route of seeding a scaffold with an appropriate progenitor cell type and culturing in a bioreactor in vitro followed by in vivo implantat..