Bagrat Grigoryan and Jordan Miller, Physiologic Systems Engineering & Advanced Materials Lab at Rice University.
Over the last
several decades, various advances in tissue engineering have allowed for the
not so distant possibility of replacing, repairing, or regenerating injured
tissues1. Significant progress has been
made in understanding cellular biology as well as pathophysiology and healthy
states of tissues. Additionally, a suite of diverse biofabrication technologies
and biomaterials has been conceived, enabling fabrication of complex 3D tissues
with greater physiological relevance compared to the traditional 2D context
that cells are studied in2. However, the field of tissue
engineering still has unresolved questions involving choice of fabrication
technique, biomaterial, cellular niche, or even cell type when designing a
synthetic tissue.
While different
fabrication techniques and biomaterials have been explored in fabricating
tissues in vitro, the use of stem
cells in engineered tissues is ubiquitous. Not surprisingly so, as biologists
continually demonstrate novel ways of directing different lineage commitment of
stem cells and further unlocking their vast regenerative potential3. Indeed, stem cell banks have
emerged to cryogenically store a patient’s own cells as the therapeutic
potential of stem cells is being positively demonstrated in multiple clinical
trials4. With over 450 mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based trials alone currently ongoing or completed, the
regenerative and immunoregulatory properties of MSCs are constantly being
exploited to improve the quality of human life5.
Due to the immense therapeutic potential of MSCs, there is a need to rapidly and reproducibly grow a vast amount of MSCs for clinical and research purposes. Although MSCs were
identified and isolated from bone marrow more than 40 years ago, we still have
not fully mapped their biological characteristics3.
