ABSTRACT
Tissue engineering technologies proer signicant promise and potential to generate ECM structures using autologous patient-derived cells toward custom-fabricating tissue and organ replacements on demand. Dierently, principles of regenerative medicine employ autologous or allogeneic cell types or their secretions, in situ repair or regeneration of the ECM of tissues that are structurally compromised by disease, trauma, or aging, to restore their form and function (Greenwood et al. 2006, Mason and Dunnill 2008). Despite nearly three decades of progressive innovation and renements in pertinent tools and methodologies, the promise of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine remains unfullled due to signicant challenges to replicating the complex matrix composition and architecture of various so tissues, particularly those containing cell types that may be classied as permanent or stable cell (e.g., cardiac and vascular cells). One yet unsurmounted roadblock is the poor capacity of postneonatal cells, barring exceptions such as smooth muscle cells (SMCs) of the bladder (Wognum et al. 2009) and vaginal wall (Rahn et al. 2008), to synthesize elastin precursors (tropoelastin) and to recruit and organize these precursors into mature elastic bers and tissue-specic higher order architectures (e.g., sheets, lamellae) in a manner that recapitulates developmental elastogenesis (Parks et al. 1993, Swee et al. 1995). ese intrinsic deciencies are exacerbated in cells within a disease
milieu (Human et al. 2000), and can have serious ramications to our ability to restore healthy tissue function because elastic bers critically maintain native tissue structure, enable their stretch and recoil following release of stretching forces, and also regulate behavior of contacting cells via biomechanical transductive contacting cues (Robert et al. 1995, Faury et al. 1998, Li et al. 1998a,b).
