background: micropatterning is becoming a powerful tool for studying cells in vitro. this method not only uses very small amount of material but also mimic the microenvironment structure present in living tissues better than flask culturing techniques. in previous studies using micropatterning of extracellular matrix proteins on glass surfaces, the rate of protein detachment from the surface wa...

stem cells are self-renewing cells that can be differentiated into other cell types. conventional in vitro models for studying stem cells differentiation are usually preformed in two-dimensional (2d) cultures. the design of three-dimensional (3d) in vitro models which ideally are supposed to mimic the in vivo stem cells microenvironment is potentially useful for inducing stem cell derived tissu...

Introduction Perforation of maxillary sinus mucous membrane is of the most prevalent complication during open sinus lift surgery. Moreover, such complication can usually be managed by an absorbable membrane. As far as absorbable membranes are concerned, decellularized maxillary sinus mucous membranes, which is an extracellular matrix, can be used as a biologic scaffold and insulating membrane ...

The engineering of 3-dimensional (3D) heart muscles has undergone exciting progress for the past decade. Profound advances in human stem cell biology and technology, tissue engineering and material sciences, as well as prevascularization and in vitro assay technologies make the first clinical application of engineered cardiac tissues a realistic option and predict that cardiac tissue engineerin...

A major challenge of tissue engineering is directing cells to establish the physiological structure and function of the tissue being replaced. Electrical stimulation has been used to induce synchronous contractions of cultured cardiac constructs. The hypothesis adopted for this study is that functional cardiac constructs can be engineered by "mimicking" the conditions present during cardiac dev...

The promise of cardiac tissue engineering is in the ability to recapitulate in vitro the functional aspects of a healthy heart and disease pathology as well as to design replacement muscle for clinical therapy. Parts of this promise have been realized; others have not. In a meeting of scientists in this field, five central challenges or "big questions" were articulated that, if addressed, could...

During the past several decades, major advances and improvements now promote better treatment options for cardiovascular diseases. However, these diseases still remain the single leading cause of death worldwide. The rapid development of cardiac tissue engineering has provided the opportunity to potentially restore the contractile function and retain the pumping feature of injured hearts. This ...

Cardiac tissue engineering aims at repairing the diseased heart and developing cardiac tissues for basic research and predictive toxicology applications. Since the first description of engineered heart tissue 15 years ago, major development steps were directed toward these three goals. Technical innovations led to improved three-dimensional cardiac tissue structure and near physiological contra...

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide(1). Cardiac tissue engineering holds much promise to deliver groundbreaking medical discoveries with the aims of developing functional tissues for cardiac regeneration as well as in vitro screening assays. However, the ability to create high-fidelity models of heart tissue has proven difficult. The heart's extracellular matrix ...

Here, we review an approach to tissue engineering of functional myocardium that is biomimetic in nature, as it involves the use of culture systems designed to recapitulate some aspects of the actual in vivo environment. To mimic the capillary network, subpopulations of neonatal rat heart cells were cultured on a highly porous elastomer scaffold with a parallel array of channels perfused with cu...