Tissue Engineering

Faculty: George, Putnam

The cost of treating patients with organ or tissue failure accounts for approximately 50% of the total health care costs in the United States annually. There are a variety of therapies available to combat these health problems, including organ or tissue transplantation and the use of completely synthetic prosthetic devices. However, organ/tissue transplantation is limited by a shortage of donor tissue suitable for transplantation. Synthetic prostheses typically do not replace all functions of a lost tissue or organ, and are incapable of adapting to the body's changing needs over time. These limitations have spurred interest in engineering tissues that could be used to replace lost or failing tissues using cells and synthetic extracellular matrices (ECMs).

By combining the advantages of whole organ transplantation and completely synthetic prostheses, tissue engineering emerged in the 1980s as a viable therapeutic alternative, promising the creation of "off-the-shelf" organs and tissues. Initially driven by collaborations between chemical engineers and surgeons, tissue engineering was officially defined at a National Science Foundation workshop in 1988 as "the application of principles and methods of engineering and life sciences toward fundamental understanding of structure- function relationships in normal and pathological mammalian tissues and the development of biological substitutes to restore, maintain or improve tissue function."

Tissue engineering research at UC Irvine takes many forms, and involves active collaboration between chemical engineers and materials scientists with biomedical engineers, surgeons, and cell/molecular biologists. In the ChEMS department, fundamental research addressing the interactions between cells and novel biomaterials is being conducted in vitro, along with more applied research designed to engineer vascular networks into tissue constructs for implantation in vivo. Engineered tissues are also being used as model systems in which to study the pathologies of asthma and cancer.

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