Tissue Builder

The triangle

It seems like my job is getting more and more hectic. I started it a month ago, and now I am getting ready to start actual experiments. My PhD background was mainly focused on some biomaterials aspects, but mainly I worked with bioreactors, which I’ll talk about sometime. My project now focuses a lot on biomaterials, most specifically scaffolds for tissue regeneration. Scaffolds form part of the popular tissue engineering triangle. I have posted a little schematic of this triangle here, created by me, yay!

But you may be wondering why in the world we need tissue engineering. I mean, there are prostheses; the body can regenerate by itself, we can pray and wait for a miracle, be kidnapped by extraterrestrials and have them apply their ultra-mega-regenerative rays on us, etc. True, many tissues in the body, such as bone and skin, can regenerate by themselves under certain conditions. If you’ve ever had a fracture, you know you’ll get a cast and, voila!, at some point your bones are fine and dandy, and you didn’t have to go to work for a few days, which is always a plus. But what would happen if you were undergoing chemotherapy in which case cellular activity diminishes? or if the gap were so large that your bones wouldn’t be able to achieve any successful even if they try hard?. It would be like jumping from one building to another that is far away, no matter how hard you try to jump, you’d be screwed anyway. So Doctors then try to fix the injury using all kinds or mechanical means, such as implantation of prosthesis, or taking a piece of healthy tissue from yourself (autograft) or from someone else (allograft) to put it into the site of injury. Some people claim that this all works beautifully, then why the heck does the research area even exist?! The truth is that these technologies have worked to some extent, but major limitations remain. Prostheses result in ware out of the surrounding tissue, requiring further surgeries. Autografts would be ideal, but there is little availability and morbidity at the site of harvesting of the graft. Allografts present similar problems, in addition to posing risks of disease transmission and some serious immune reaction. WOW! Don’t worry now! we have tissue engineering to save us! (that sounded like an entrance from the justice league, and now you can tell how old I am). In any case, tissue engineering tries to aid the body regenerating lost or damaged tissue, overcoming all the limitations that I have talked about. And here is where I go back to the triangle! But this post is getting too long, and you guys won’t finish reading it. So I’ll post the end of my little tissue engineering introduction tomorrow… don ’t hate me; I know how exciting this has been!

Wonderful report

Back in 2003, the National Science Foundation published a report titled "The Emergence of Tissue Engineering as a Research Field" A lot of things have happened since then, but it encapsulates all the basics, and not so basics, to get a good feeling of what Tissue Engineering is about. Click here to read it. I promise that in my next post I will write a summary basic enough for everyone to understand. I was asked today why I wanted to write this blog... I think that the field needs some push and also some reevaluation; let this be, along with my publications, a little bit of a contribution.

What tissue engineers may need to accept....

Leonardo Da Vinci at some point designed what could be the first in vitro model of a heart valve, 500 years ago! Well, you would say that we have come a long way since then on creating these models. That is arguable. But the truth is that many models today follow the same principle. We certainly now have a greater understanding of how they look and function, and the quest becomes more impassionate everyday. Even though, that is work in progress, a number of people are taking advantage of that knowledge and combine it with biology and engineering to regenerate body tissues and entire organs. I just realized that if given the resources we have today, Da Vinci would have been an amazing tissue engineer. But there is a crucial difference between tissue engineers and Da Vinci, and that is that he was an artist, a philosopher, who viewed life as a whole. Perhaps we need to go back to looking at things in a more complete sense, as Jonah Lehrer suggested in his book “Proust was a neuroscientist.” I think that life is orchestrated by so many different factors, and they complement one another; scientists have forgotten about that. In this blog, I will try to report what the latest advances in the field are, and attempt to analyze where we are going and how close we are to the ultimate goal of reconstructing organs. But most importantly, I will try to make a point that, to make even greater progress, we need the humanities: the arts, the philosophy and a genuine interest to help others.