ABSTRACT
Tissue engineering expanded rapidly throughout the 1990s based on the promise to create new organs and tissue constructs to replace diseased or damaged organs (Nerem 2006). However, two decades later, few products have successfully passed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clinical trials (Jaklenec et al. 2012); a feasible transplantable organ is still unattainable. More importantly, an organ shortage continues to persist because a consistent technique for providing vasculature and integration of tissue-engineered constructs into the host has not yet been realized (Phelps and García 2010).
