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Tissue Engineered Skin: Apligraf®
Tissue Engineering. Tissue Engineering's Place in Therapeutic Medicine.
Therapeutic applications of TE
effectively fit in between the organ
transplantation an medical devices (Fig
1).
Formal Definition of TE. (Term first coined by Y.C. Fung in 1987)
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
functions.
Figure 1. (Courtesy of Dr. Putnam, BME 210 Cell/Tissue Engineering)
Skin TE Approach.
Many skin engineered grafts are autologous (or self
derived). A biopsy of the patients own skin is taken. That
tissue is digested into a cell suspension and then expanded
in culture. Finally those cells are seeded into a scaffold,
usually some sort of natural, synthetic, or hybrid matrix,
and placed into a bioreactor of some kind for development.
The resulting tissue is grafted back onto the patient.
Figure 2.
(Courtesy of Dr. Putnam, BME 210 Cell/Tissue Engineering.)
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