Obstacles and challenges for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: Australian nuances

Abstract

The clinical need and historical approaches to tissue engineering as applied to regenerative medicine are introduced, along with comments on activities in this field around Australia, and then the huge advances for tissue culture studies are discussed (Part A). Combinations of human stem cells and new approaches for generating bioscaffolds present great opportunities for in vitro studies of basic biology and physiology, drug testing and high throughput screening for the pharmaceutical industry, and the advanced tissue engineering of organs and devices. The future here is bright. The major obstacles arise with in vivo application of these bioengineering advances using animal models and humans (Part B), and the complexity of living tissues and the challenges of increased scale required for clinical translation to the large human situation are first discussed. While clinical success seen with implantation of acellular bioscaffolds (with population by host cells) is likely to expand for human use, the major challenge relates to (generally) low survival in vivo of (donor or autologous) cells that are expanded and grown in tissue culture before implantation into the living body. Another major challenge is revascularisation of implanted tissues/organs at the human scale. The innovative approaches and rapid advances in tissue bioengineering hold great promise for overcoming these major obstacles and extending the clinical applications of these technologies.

Bioresorbable and degradable behaviors of PGA: Current state and future prospects

“…Revascularization of implanted tissue engineered scaffolds at the human scale is one of the major challenges. [148] Another major challenge is the cell seeding on surface and within the scaffold. Some findings showed that seeding of autologous bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) on PGA scaffold coated with poly 4-hydroxybutyrate (P4HB) gave a promising autologous trileaflet heart valve.…”

A Bibliometric Review of Artificial Extracellular Matrices Based on Tissue Engineering Technology Literature: 1990 through 2019

“…The ECM and cellular composition of different tissues vary widely between cell types and they each pose their own engineering challenges [ 49 , 54 ]. It is vital for biomaterials to not only mimic the structural components of the ECM, but to also have the ability to promote adhesion, differentiation and proliferation of cells [ 49 , 55 , 56 ]. Over the last three decades, there has been an increase in publications developing various types of biomaterials as shown in the key term maps for topic set 2.…”

240th ENMC workshop: The involvement of skeletal muscle stem cells in the pathology of muscular dystrophies 25–27 January 2019, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands

“…These major problems need to be realistically addressed when proposing stem cell therapies for muscular dystrophies. Another therapeutic strategy for delivering myogenic stem cells, is the exciting field of tissue engineering that aims to build new muscle constructs to replace muscles that are unable to regenerate due to some impaired intrinsic capacity of muscle stem cells; while this holds great promise for many creative tissue culture studies of muscle cells, there remain serious challenges for clinical applications [8] .…”