Il Giornale di chirurgia
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Il Giornale di chirurgia · Nov 2009
ReviewTissue engineering technologies: just a quick note about transplantation of bioengineered donor trachea and augmentation cystoplasty by de novo engineered bladder tissue.
Tissue engineering technologies: just a quick note about transplantation of bioengineered donor trachea and augmentation cystoplasty by de novo engineered bladder tissue. C. Alberti Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary scientific field that aims at manufacturing in vitro biological substitutes to enhance or replace failing human organs. ⋯ Nevertheless, the use of adult organ-specific cells shows many limitations, such as difficulties in their harvesting (potential complications associated with invasive biopsies) and their low proliferative ability. Therefore, various populations of either embryonic or adult stem cells and progenitor cells have been studied as useful cell sources for the tissue engineering. Bioreactors are essential in such technologies, both providing chemo-physical cell culture dynamic conditions, that mimic the in vivo environment, and allowing the assessment of responses of biological substitutes to different biochemical signals and mechanical forces.