TY - JOUR A2 - Levy, Brynn AU - Nemeno-Guanzon, Judee Grace AU - Lee, Soojung AU - Berg, Johan Robert AU - Jo, Yong Hwa AU - Yeo, Jee Eun AU - Nam, Bo Mi AU - Koh, Yong-Gon AU - Lee, Jeong Ik PY - 2012 DA - 2012/11/08 TI - Trends in Tissue Engineering for Blood Vessels SP - 956345 VL - 2012 AB - Over the years, cardiovascular diseases continue to increase and affect not only human health but also the economic stability worldwide. The advancement in tissue engineering is contributing a lot in dealing with this immediate need of alleviating human health. Blood vessel diseases are considered as major cardiovascular health problems. Although blood vessel transplantation is the most convenient treatment, it has been delimited due to scarcity of donors and the patient’s conditions. However, tissue-engineered blood vessels are promising alternatives as mode of treatment for blood vessel defects. The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of the advancement on biofabrication technology for treatment of soft tissue defects particularly for vascular tissues. This will also provide an overview and update on the current status of tissue reconstruction especially from autologous stem cells, scaffolds, and scaffold-free cellular transplantable constructs. The discussion of this paper will be focused on the historical view of cardiovascular tissue engineering and stem cell biology. The representative studies featured in this paper are limited within the last decade in order to trace the trend and evolution of techniques for blood vessel tissue engineering. SN - 2314-6133 UR - https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/956345 DO - 10.1155/2012/956345 JF - Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology PB - Hindawi Publishing Corporation KW - ER -