The Self-Assembling Process and Applications in Tissue Engineering
- 1Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95616
- 2Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of California, Davis, California 95616
- Correspondence: athanasiou{at}ucdavis.edu
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↵3 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Tissue engineering strives to create neotissues capable of restoring function. Scaffold-free technologies have emerged that can recapitulate native tissue function without the use of an exogenous scaffold. This review will survey, in particular, the self-assembling and self-organization processes as scaffold-free techniques. Characteristics and benefits of each process are described, and key examples of tissues created using these scaffold-free processes are examined to provide guidance for future tissue-engineering developments. We aim to explore the potential of self-assembly and self-organization scaffold-free approaches, detailing the recent progress in the in vitro tissue engineering of biomimetic tissues with these methods toward generating functional tissue replacements.
