Tissue engineered scaffolds for an effective healing and regeneration: reviewing orthotopic studies

Abstract

It is commonly stated that tissue engineering is the most promising approach to treat or replace failing tissues/organs. For this aim, a specific strategy should be planned including proper selection of biomaterials, fabrication techniques, cell lines, and signaling cues. A great effort has been pursued to develop suitable scaffolds for the restoration of a variety of tissues and a huge number of protocols ranging from in vitro to in vivo studies, the latter further differentiating into several procedures depending on the type of implantation (i.e., subcutaneous or orthotopic) and the model adopted (i.e., animal or human), have been developed. All together, the published reports demonstrate that the proposed tissue engineering approaches spread toward multiple directions. The critical review of this scenario might suggest, at the same time, that a limited number of studies gave a real improvement to the field, especially referring to in vivo investigations. In this regard, the present paper aims to review the results of in vivo tissue engineering experimentations, focusing on the role of the scaffold and its specificity with respect to the tissue to be regenerated, in order to verify whether an extracellular matrix-like device, as usually stated, could promote an expected positive outcome.

Figure 1

Timeline of published papers (number per year) from the PubMed website using the key “scaffold tissue engineering” (updated to July, 2014).

Figure 2

Strategies to develop a functional tissue engineered substitute for regeneration of failing tissues and organs. Synthetic, natural, or hybrid scaffolds can be treated to improve their features and performances, seeded with different cells types before implantation or directly in vivo implanted after the fabrication procedure.