Tissue engineering (1987)

Vacanti and longer grow cell tissue.

The uses of combination of cells, suitable biochemical and physicochemical factor, engineering and material method to improve or replace biological tissues is called tissue engineering

Dr. W.T.green, a pediatric orthopedist at children's hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, made one of the first attempts at tissue engineering. He tried to grow cartilage in laboratory mice. Although unsuccessful, his work set the stage for later attempts by suggesting that, once suitable material were invented, cell would grow on configured scaffolds.

Joseph Vacanti, a transplant surgeon, and Robert Langer, an engineered biosynthetic, biodegradable scaffold in 1987. The scaffolds they developed provided access to nutrients as well as waste removal for the growing cells. The final structure can resemble a natural organ.

A famous development was the "auriculosaurus", a mouse with a human shaped ear growing on its back. The " ear" was a biodegradable scaffold seeded with bovine cartilage cells. The mouse was a nude animal specifically bred not to reject foreign protein. The auriculosaurus, filmed, back a BBC video crew, became the image of tissue engineering worldwide

In 1998 a factory workers was presented to the university of Massachusetts medical center after the last bone in his thumb was  ripped off in machinery, leaving just the flesh. Vacanti ground a piece of coral into the shape of the missing bone. The coral was than seeded with bone cells, and eventually implanted. As the coral dissolved, the bone displaced the structure.

These two example were grown inside organisms. Engineered tissue is more commonly grown in bioreactor vessels designed to provide nutrients and remove waste more efficiently that could be done in a petri dish.Regenerative medicine is a board field thet include tissue engineering. it is used to recreate cell and rebuild tissues and organs.

Regenerative medicine is a broad field that includes tissue engineering but also incorporates research on self-healing – where the body uses its own systems, sometimes with help foreign biological material to recreate cells and rebuild tissuesand organs.