News & Analysis
/
Article

Recent advances in engineering vascularized tissues

MAR 17, 2023
Incorporating blood vessels into engineered tissues is a necessary but challenging step in creating functional tissues and organs.
Recent advances in engineering vascularized tissues internal name

Recent advances in engineering vascularized tissues lead image

Creating artificial organs is a long-standing goal of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, providing a potential alternative to organ donation without the complications arising from rejection. Growing complex, functional tissues has additional applications in cancer research, drug development, and disease modeling. One of the biggest obstacles researchers face is vascularization: functional tissues need functional networks of blood vessels.

Ren et al. described recent advances in engineering vascularized tissues, including both in vitro models and in vivo applications. They discussed promising approaches and future opportunities.

“While tissue engineering has emerged as a critical field for drug testing and therapeutic designs, vascularizing engineered tissues remains a long-standing challenge,” said author Yong Huang. “Thanks to technological advances, the field has advanced significantly, and the research community needs a timely review.”

Blood vessels come in a variety of shapes, from large arteries to micron-sized capillaries, and are made of multiple cell types that all contribute to the delivery and removal of oxygen and nutrients. Such complex networks require advanced technologies to create them. Engineering approaches can manufacture large vessels through casting or channel printing, and biological approaches can induce self-assembling capillary structures.

With these technologies, researchers can create generic tissue models, tumor models, and organ-specific models for the heart, lungs, and brain in vitro. The team outlined the unique considerations for each of these cases and their representative realizations. They also discussed in vivo applications with vascularized tissue grafts and concluded with opportunities for future research.

“The next big challenges may include the identification of biofabrication technologies and biomaterials to engineer complex vascularized tissues with tissue-specific characteristics,” said Huang.

Source: “Realizations of vascularized tissues: from in vitro platforms to in vivo grafts,” by Bing Ren, Zhihua Jiang, Walter Lee Murfee, Adam J. Katz, Dietmar Siemann, and Yong Huang, Biophysics Reviews (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0131972 .

Related Topics
More Science
/
Article
Pentagonal-shaped photonic-crystal lightsails could one day propel tiny spacecraft to other stars.
APS
/
Article
A new study of complex systems supports a growing trend that focuses more on analyzing a system’s collective behavior rather than on trying to uncover the underlying interaction mechanisms.
AAS
/
Article
An team of astronomers has obtained high-resolution images of all known protoplanetary disks in the Lupus star-forming region
AAS
/
Article
Could there have been two massive black holes in our galaxy’s center at one time? New modeling of fast-moving stars in the Milky Way’s halo suggests the answer is yes.