Tissue Engineering in Liver Regenerative Medicine: Insights into Novel Translational Technologies

Abstract

Organ and tissue shortage are known as a crucially important public health problem as unfortunately a small percentage of patients receive transplants. In the context of emerging regenerative medicine, researchers are trying to regenerate and replace different organs and tissues such as the liver, heart, skin, and kidney. Liver tissue engineering (TE) enables us to reproduce and restore liver functions, fully or partially, which could be used in the treatment of acute or chronic liver disorders and/or generate an appropriate functional organ which can be transplanted or employed as an extracorporeal device. In this regard, a variety of techniques (e.g., fabrication technologies, cell-based technologies, microfluidic systems and, extracorporeal liver devices) could be applied in tissue engineering in liver regenerative medicine. Common TE techniques are based on allocating stem cell-derived hepatocyte-like cells or primary hepatocytes within a three-dimensional structure which leads to the improvement of their survival rate and functional phenotype. Taken together, new findings indicated that developing liver tissue engineering-based techniques could pave the way for better treatment of liver-related disorders. Herein, we summarized novel technologies used in liver regenerative medicine and their future applications in clinical settings.

Engineering a Model to Study Viral Infections: Bioprinting, Microfluidics, and Organoids to Defeat Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

“…The liver is also challenging for bioprinting mainly because of its complex structure that includes microvasculature and innervation[ 131 ]. However, there is a number of studies achieved good results in the restoration of the liver morphology and functionality.…”

“…To mimic air and liquid flow for recapitulating the in vivo conditions, microfluidics can be used as a tool. Such systems can be fabricated using bioprinting[ 137 - 139 ] and have been already approved as both single organ (organ-on-a-chip)[ 131 , 140 - 143 ] and integrated (body-on-a-chip) platforms[ 144 - 146 ]. Multi-organ model systems are more physiologically relevant and permits better detection of complex virus-host effects than the first ones.…”

Engineering of tissue constructs using coaxial bioprinting

“…Significant attention has been given to tissue engineering of the digestive system; other reviews have focused on bioprinting strategies for this organ system, so we present only enough background here to demonstrate the use for coaxial bioprinting in these tissues [ [106] , [107] , [108] , [109] ]. Applications include pancreatic islet culture for diabetes treatment [ 110 ] and intestinal engineering [ 44 , 111 ].…”

Mesenchymal stem cells: a promising way in therapies of graft-versus-host disease

“…3D printing technology, as an emerging discipline, is receiving increasing attention from the medical community. Ma et al printed a 3D microscale hexagonal architecture using hydrogel which embedded in adiposederived MSCs [99]. This could be a outstanding direction for further study.…”