A Few Recent Advances in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine

The tissue engineering and regenerative medicine communities are too large and energetic to do more than sample their output, or note the most interesting advances that stand out from the pack. The publicity materials I'll point out here are a recent selection of items that caught my eye as they went past. Dozens more, each of which would have merited worldwide attention ten or fifteen years ago, drift by with little comment every year. The state of the art is progressing rapidly towards both the ability to build complex tissues from a cell sample, such as patient-matched organs for transplantation, and the ability to control regeneration and growth inside the body. Ultimately we may not need transplantation if native organs can be persuaded to repair themselves ... but this will likely also require significant progress towards repairing the cell and tissue damage of aging, the forms of molecular breakage that degrade regenerative capacity. Even though the research community has progressed a long way past the capabilities of even a decade ago, there remains a longer road ahead. Transplants of cell populations are still very challenging; only a small fraction of those cells survive to take up residence and contribute over the long term. The best technology demonstrations manage 10% survival or thereabouts. Standard approaches to finding the best methodology for each cell type and situation have yet to arise. There is a lot of trial and error. Yet replacement of cell pop...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs