Engineering Tissues without the Use of a Synthetic Scaffold: A Twenty-Year History of the Self-Assembly Method

Figure 1

Tissue-engineering strategies. The tissue-engineering strategies are mainly based on cell population extraction from patient’s biopsies followed by cell amplification with phenotype maintenance or adequate differentiation. Cells are then seeded on preformed scaffolds, made of synthetic or biologic (including decellularized tissue) biomaterials, and cultivated until grafting. Alternatively, mesenchymal cells can be plated on culture dishes and cultivated in the presence of ascorbate to form their own stroma which could be seeded with epithelial cells. The reconstructed tissue could also serve as accurate models for the study of a wide panel of pathologies.