Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: Achievements, Future, and Sustainability in Asia

Abstract

Exploring innovative solutions to improve the healthcare of the aging and diseased population continues to be a global challenge. Among a number of strategies toward this goal, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) has gradually evolved into a promising approach to meet future needs of patients. TERM has recently received increasing attention in Asia, as evidenced by the markedly increased number of researchers, publications, clinical trials, and translational products. This review aims to give a brief overview of TERM development in Asia over the last decade by highlighting some of the important advances in this field and featuring major achievements of representative research groups. The development of novel biomaterials and enabling technologies, identification of new cell sources, and applications of TERM in various tissues are briefly introduced. Finally, the achievement of TERM in Asia, including important publications, representative discoveries, clinical trials, and examples of commercial products will be introduced. Discussion on current limitations and future directions in this hot topic will also be provided.

Keywords: Asia; biomaterials; biomechanics; cell sources; regenerative medicine; tissue engineering.

FIGURE 1

(A) An interwoven aligned conductive nanofiber yarn/hydrogel hybrid scaffolds for mimicking the native cardiac tissue structure (reproduced with permission from Wu et al., 2017). (B) A thin, long, and finely handleable cell fiber fabricated by using a microfluidic device (reproduced with permission from Onoe et al., 2013).

FIGURE 2

Future cardiac regenerative therapy by cell transplantation-based approach using iPS cell-derived cardiomyocytes (Upper) and direct cardiac reprogramming approach (Lower) (reproduced with permission from Sadahiro et al., 2015).

FIGURE 3

The number of publications in different Asian countries (A), and different fields in China (B), Japan (C), and South Korea (D) from 2009 to 2019.