Function-oriented design: A novel strategy for advanced biomedical materials

It has always been a dream to construct tissues and even organs for transplantation to replace those with defects caused by diseases or injuries. Tissue engineering is another milestone in the developmental history of life science after cellular and molecular bioscience. Nevertheless, despite decades of rapid development, tissue-engineered biomaterials have not been widely used clinically. Biomaterials constructed by physical and chemical methods have lots of difficulty in precisely mimicking the macroscopic and microscopic structures of human tissues. The ultimate way to build organoid tissue for regeneration is to enable the cells to take the initiative and build suitable functions. Based on the thoughts of tissue engineering, organoid technology holds great potential as a research tool for a wide range of fields, including developmental biology, disease pathology, cell biology, precision medicine, and drug toxicity and efficacy testing. This technology also holds tremendous potential for regenerative medicine, as organoids present the possibility for autologous and allogeneic cell therapy through the replacement of damaged or diseased tissues with organoid-propagated tissue or stem cell populations. In this review work, we briefly outlook the development history of organoid technology, summarize the current bottlenecks and the underlying reasons, and propose the unified term function-oriented design in tissue engineering, a new topic that may provide a solution to overcome these bottlenecks. (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The editorial office of Journal of Materials Science & Technology. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )

Automated summary

Tissue engineering is a milestone in the developmental history of life science, but tissue-engineered biomaterials have not been widely used clinically. To overcome these challenges, a new approach has been proposed, focusing on the construction of organoid structures and function-oriented design.