Tissue Engineering. Part B, Reviews

Extensive bone fractures, which can seriously impact both health and quality of life, cannot easily heal naturally, especially if the patient has an underlying medical condition or is aging. The most promising approach to addressing such fractures is bone regeneration through bone tissue engineering. Bone regeneration is a complex process that consists of three distinct phases: inflammation, repair, and remodelling. Macrophages play a bridging role between the various cells involved in each stage of bone regeneration, interacting with different microenvironments and advancing the bone-healing process...

The development of tracheal tissue engineering has seen a rapid growth in recent years. The purpose of this study was to investigate the global status, trends, and hotspots of tracheal tissue engineering research based on bibliometrics and visualization analysis. Publications related to tracheal tissue engineering were retrieved and included in the Web of Science Core Collection. VOSviewer and CiteSpace were used to generate knowledge maps. 655 publications were identified, and the quantity of the annual publications worldwide was on the increase...

The intestine is a visceral organ that integrates absorption, metabolism, and immunity, which is vulnerable to external stimulus. Researchers in the fields such as food science, immunology and pharmacology have committed to developing appropriate in vitro intestinal cell models to study the intestinal absorption and metabolism mechanisms of various nutrients and drugs, or pathogenesis of intestinal diseases. In the past three decades, the intestinal cell models have undergone a significant transformation from conventional two-dimensional (2D) cultures to three-dimensional (3D) systems, and the achievements of 3D cell culture have been greatly contributed by the fabrication of different scaffolds...

In conventional bone tissue engineering, cells are seeded onto scaffolds to create three-dimensional tis-sues, but the cells on the scaffolds are unable to effectively perform their physiological functions due to their low density and viability. Cell sheet (CS) engineering is expected to be free from this limitation. CS engi-neering uses the principles of self-assembly and self-organization of endothelial and mesenchymal stem cells to prepare CSs as building blocks for engineering bone grafts. This process recapitulates the native tissue de-velopment, thus attracting significant attention in the field of bone regeneration...

The potential of urine-derived stem cells (USCs) for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine has attracted much attention during the last few decades. However, it has been suggested that the effects of the USCs may be endowed by their paracrine extracellular vesicles (EVs) rather than their differentiation. Compared with the USCs, the USC-EVs can cross the barriers more easily and safely, and their inclusions may mediate intercellular communication and promote the tissue repair. This article has summarized the current knowledge and applications about the USC-EVs in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, and discussed the prospects and challenges for using them as an alternative to cell therapy...

Respiratory infections caused by coronaviruses (CoVs) have become a major public health concern in the past two decades as revealed by the emergence of SARS-CoV in 2002, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 in 2019. The most severe clinical phenotypes commonly arise from exacerbation of immune response following the infection of alveolar epithelial cells localized at the pulmonary blood-air barrier. Preclinical rodent models do not adequately represent the essential genetic properties of the barrier, thus necessitating the use of humanized transgenic models...

Craniofacial defects and dental tissue loss have significant negative impacts on the structure and function of jaws and face, often resulting in psychological issues in patients, emphasizing the urgent need for effective craniofacial tissue reconstruction. Unfortunately, natural regeneration of these tissues is limited. Dental-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have emerged as a promising resource for tissue engineering-based therapeutic approaches. However, the clinical outcomes of MSC-based transplantation have not met expectations due to various complex reasons, and cellular senescence is recognized as one of the potential mechanisms contributing to the suboptimal results...

Adipose-derived stem cell-conditioned medium (ADSC-CM) has been widely studied and used as a stem cell-based cell-free therapy. Due to the explosion of scientific publications in this field, it's difficult to review all relevant publications systematically, not mention quantitively. In this study, we combined bibliometrics with the conventional review method to summarize, analyze and visualize the characteristics of nearly all published articles related to ADSC-CM using Citespace-¬a bibliometrics software...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Polyurethane (PU) and PU ceramic scaffolds are the principal materials investigated for developing synthetic bone materials due to their excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability. PU has been combined with calcium phosphate (such as hydroxyapatite (HA) and tricalcium phosphate) to prepare scaffolds with enhanced mechanical properties and biocompatibility. This paper reviews the latest progress in the design, synthesis, modification, and biological attributes of HA/PU scaffolds for bone tissue engineering...

Dentin is a bonelike matrix that forms the bulk of the tooth. By fabricating dentin with protocols involving demineralization, sterilization and preservation, TDM/DDM could be obtained, which is considered as a useful tool for bone and tooth-tissue regeneration. Non-negligible inflammatory and immune responses are reviewed in this manuscript of autogenous, allogeneic and xenogeneic TDM/DDM for the first time. Both autogenous and allogeneic TDM/DDM showed good biocompatibility in original and clinical studies, while a few cases reported the observation of inflammatory cells around tissue samples...

The incidence and prevalence of hearing loss is increasing globally at an accelerated pace. Hair cells represent the sensory receptors of auditory and vestibular systems. Hair cell absence, loss or degeneration due to congenital diseases, trauma, toxicity, infection or advancing age, results in disabling hearing loss. Regenerative medicine (RM) approaches consisting in stem cell-based hair cell rescue or regeneration, gene therapy as well as cell and tissue engineering are expected to dramatically improve the therapeutic arsenal available for addressing hearing loss...

The craniofacial region contains skin, bones, cartilage, the temporomandibular joint, teeth, periodontal tissues, mucosa, salivary glands, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. Applying tissue engineering therapeutically helps replace lost tissues after trauma or cancer. Despite recent advances, it remains essential to standardize and validate the most appropriate animal models to effectively translate pre-clinical data to clinical situations. Therefore, this review focused on applying various animal models in craniofacial tissue engineering and regeneration...

Inadequate vascularization is a significant barrier to clinical application of large-volume tissue engineered grafts. In contrast to in vivo vascularization, in vitro prevascularization shortens the time required for host vessels to grow into the graft core and minimizes necrosis in the core region of the graft. However, the challenge of prevascularization is to construct hierarchical perfusable vascular networks, increase graft volume, and form a vascular tip that can anastomose with host vessels. Understanding advances in in vitro prevascularization techniques and new insights into angiogenesis could overcome these obstacles...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting, or additive manufacturing, is a rapid fabrication technique with the foremost objective of creating biomimetic tissue and organ replacements in hopes of restoring normal tissue function and structure. Generating the engineered organs with an infrastructure that is similar to that of the real organs can be beneficial to simulate the functional organs that work inside our bodies. Photopolymerization-based 3D bioprinting, or photocuring, has emerged as a promising method in engineering biomimetic tissues due to its simplicity, non-invasive, and spatially controllable approach...

With the recent developments in tissue engineering, scientists have attempted to establish seed cells from different sources, create cell sheets through various technologies, implant them on scaffolds with various spatial structures, or load scaffolds with cytokines. These research results are very optimistic, bringing hope to the treatment of patients with uterine infertility. In this paper, we reviewed all the articles related to the treatment of uterine infertility from the aspects of experimental treatment strategy, seed cells, scaffold application, and repair criteria so as to provide a basis for future research...

Myocardial infarction (MI) results in the significant loss of cardiomyocytes (CM) due to the ischemic injury following coronary occlusion leading to impaired contractility, fibrosis, and ultimately heart failure (HF). Stem cell therapy emerged as a promising regenerative strategy to replenish the otherwise terminally differentiated CM to restore cardiac function. Multiple strategies have been applied to successfully differentiate diverse stem cell populations into CM-like phenotypes characterized by the expression status of signature biomarkers and observable spontaneous contractions...

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) have been seen for years as great candidates for treating different diseases and an alternative to embryonic stem cells due to their differentiation capacity in vitro. More recent research has focused on their ability to modulate the immune response and regeneration at sites associated with inflammation, activities attributable to the release of trophic factors into the extracellular medium, a set of components known as the secretome. It has been possible to demonstrate the presence of these cells within the tumor microenvironment, which is associated with their tropism for sites of inflammation; however, their role here needs to be clarified...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.