Organ Tissue Engineering

Engineering a complete organ has long been a driving ambition for researchers in regenerative medicine. Progress in recent years has been real, and the field now understands cell phenotypes, cellular niches and the way cells interact with biomaterials. Even so, building tissues made of several cell types is still very difficult, and the scale of the task for a whole organ has to be acknowledged. The authors argue that only a step-by-step strategy can eventually yield a living tissue construct that can be implanted and can support organ function.

In this book, expert authors describe where that strategy stands today. It is meant as a concise overview and a starting point for anyone interested in applying tissue engineering or regenerative medicine to organs. Each chapter opens with a short summary of the organ's physiological and pathological changes and the current clinical need. It then covers the potential cell sources and suitable biomaterials for that organ and shows how organ-like structures can be produced.

The aim is for small engineered tissues to develop their full potential in vivo, acting as equivalents of native tissue and forming functional tissue as they integrate and mature. The book judges this outcome through well-defined functional readouts. Every chapter also reports on clinical translation, ends with the main bottlenecks and offers an outlook for the coming years. The authors suggest that a successful regenerative approach could ease the shortage of donor organs by supplying biological substitutes for clinical use, and they call for collaborative effort to get there.