Abstract
Tissue engineering provides a powerful solution for current organ shortages, and researchers have cultured blood vessels, heart tissues, and bone tissues in vitro. However, traditional top-down tissue engineering has suffered two challenges: vascularization and reconfigurability of functional units. With the continuous development of micro-nano technology and biomaterial technology, bottom-up tissue engineering as a promising approach for organ and tissue modular reconstruction has gradually developed. In this article, relevant advances in living blocks fabrication and assembly techniques for creation of higher-order bioarchitectures are described. After a critical overview of this technology, a discussion of practical challenges is provided, and future development prospects are proposed.
Highlights
Bottom-up tissue engineering has been widely used in the areas of tissue reconstruction, drug screening and cancer treatment
Some modular units with specific shapes and components can be prepared by using current methods, there is still a large gap between the structure and function of such modular units and functional units in the human body
Tissues or organs in the human body are not a repeated accumulation of functional units, and the connections between living blocks have an important impact on the biogenic, mechanical-electrical behavior of systematic tissues or organs
Summary
Bottom-up tissue engineering was developed to take the place of top-down tissue engineering [17,18] This method is usually used to fabricate function units, such as cell aggregations and cell sheets, which constructs bigger tissues or organs by using the modular assembly approach [1,11,16,19,20]. This technology aims to create modular tissues with physiological microstructure characteristics, and provide more guidance at the cellular level to guide tissue morphogenesis [19].
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