Vascularization for tissue engineering organs:research progress and application prospect / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND:An efficient blood vessel system has a decisive effect on the survival and function expression of cells in three-dimensional tissues. Therefore it has been a hot research field in tissue engineering to find an appropriate vascularization strategy. OBJECTIVE:To summarize and discuss the theory and research progress in vascularization strategies. METHODS:Literature search was performed in PubMed database for English literatures published from 2003 to 2013. The key words are“tissue engineering, vascularization, endothelial cell, scaffold”in English. Then, the papers were further analyzed and reviewed in line with the theme. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:A total of 124 papers were searched. At last, 41 papers were selected according to the titles and objectives. Vascularization is the focus and pressing issue in tissue engineering field. There are many vascularization strategies, such as growth factor delivery, cellco-culture, dynamic-culture by bioreactor, scaffolds or decellularized scaffolds. But none of them is recognized as an effective strategy to achieve functional anastomosis with the host and sustain grafts survival for a long time in vivo. It wil be a big breakthrough in the future to co-culture pluripotent stem cells with other stem cells, combine with growth factors and optimize culture conditions for the differentiation in vivo.