Recent Advances in Cell Sheet Technology for Periodontal Regeneration

Tissue engineering has yielded several successes in early clinical trials of regenerative medicine with grafting therapeutic cells seeded into biodegradable scaffolds. However this conventional cell delivery method has limited the field's progress. In recent decades, we have developed a novel cell transferring method, cell sheet technology that allows for controlled attachment and detachment of cells via simple temperature variations of a surface-intelligent temperature-responsive polymer: poly (N-isopropylacry lamide). It has been widely applied to create functional tissue sheets with cells derived from various tissues to treat a wide range of diseases. Periodontal cell sheets non-invasively harvested from temperature-responsive culture surfaces have been successfully manufactured, resulting in communicative multilayered constructs. Transplantation of cell sheets onto periodontal defects has improved bone and tissue regeneration in animal models and humans and shows low immunogenicity. In this review, we summarize the recent advances of techniques in cell sheet engineering and its application for periodontal regeneration.