Journal
ANALYST
Volume 138, Issue 8, Pages 2215-2223Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c3an36599a
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society in the United Kingdom
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom
- National Institute of Heath Research in the United Kingdom
- British Heart Foundation in the United Kingdom
- National Institutes of Health in the US
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Recent years have seen interest in approaches for directly generating fibers and scaffolds following a rising trend for their exploration in the health sciences. In this review the author wishes to briefly highlight the many approaches explored to date for generating such structures, while underlining their advantages and disadvantages, and their contribution in particular to the biomedical sciences. Such structures have been demonstrated as having implications in both the laboratory and the clinic, as they mimic the native extra cellular matrix. Interestingly the only materials investigated until very recently for generating fibrous architectures employed either natural or synthetic polymers with or without the addition of functional molecule(s). Arguably although such constructs have been demonstrated to have many applications, they lack the one unit most important for carrying out the ability to directly reconstruct a three-dimensional functional tissue, namely living cells. Therefore recent findings have demonstrated the ability to directly form cell-laden fibers and scaffolds in useful quantities from which functional three-dimensional living tissues can be conceived. These recent developments have far-reaching ramifications to many areas of research and development, a few of which range from tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, a novel approach to analyzing cell behavior and function in real time in three-dimensions, to the advanced controlled and targeted delivery of experimental and/or medical cells and/or genes for localized treatment. At present these developments have passed all in vitro and in vivo mouse model based challenge trials and are now spearheading their journey towards initiating human clinical trials.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available