Tissue Engineering: The Therapeutic Strategy of the Twenty-First Century

The loss or failure of an organ or tissue is one of the most frequent, devastating, and costly problems in health care. Tissue engineering was born largely of the need for investigators to turn to multidisciplinary approaches to solve this long-standing problem in medicine. Advances in medicine have been paralleled by increased interactions among multiple disciplines such as biology, material sciences, and engineering, which led to progress in diagnostics, monitoring, and emergence of implanted devices and tissue grafts. Moreover, as medicine continued to advance, and the survivability of major disorders and injuries increased, so did the number of patients receiving and awaiting these critical treatments, and the need for alternative therapies became clearly apparent.