Fibrosis in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: treat or trigger?

Adv Drug Deliv Rev

Department of Biohybrid & Medical Textiles (BioTex), AME - Institute of Applied Medical Engineering, Helmholtz Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Forckenbeckstr. 55, 52074 Aachen, Germany; Medical Materials and Implants, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Boltzmannstr. 15, 85748 Garching, Germany. Electronic address:

Published: June 2019

Fibrosis is a life-threatening pathological condition resulting from a dysfunctional tissue repair process. There is no efficient treatment and organ transplantation is in many cases the only therapeutic option. Here we review tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) approaches to address fibrosis in the cardiovascular system, the kidney, the lung and the liver. These strategies have great potential to achieve repair or replacement of diseased organs by cell- and material-based therapies. However, paradoxically, they might also trigger fibrosis. Cases of TERM interventions with adverse outcome are also included in this review. Furthermore, we emphasize the fact that, although organ engineering is still in its infancy, the advances in the field are leading to biomedically relevant in vitro models with tremendous potential for disease recapitulation and development of therapies. These human tissue models might have increased predictive power for human drug responses thereby reducing the need for animal testing.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.addr.2019.07.007DOI Listing

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