Abstract
The aim of regenerative medicine is to restore or establish normal function of damaged tissues or organs. Tremendous efforts are placed into development of novel regenerative strategies, involving (stem) cells, soluble factors, biomaterials or combinations thereof, as a result of the growing need caused by continuous population aging. To satisfy this need, fast and reliable assessment of (biological) performance is sought, not only to select the potentially interesting candidates, but also to rule out poor ones at an early stage of development. Microfluidics may provide a new avenue to accelerate research and development in the field of regenerative medicine as it has proven its maturity for the realization of high-throughput screening platforms. In addition, microfluidic systems offer other advantages such as the possibility to create in vivo-like microenvironments. Besides the complexity of organs or tissues that need to be regenerated, regenerative medicine brings additional challenges of complex regeneration processes and strategies. The question therefore arises whether so much complexity can be integrated into microfluidic systems without compromising reliability and throughput of assays. With this review, we aim to investigate whether microfluidics can become widely applied in regenerative medicine research and/or strategies.
Highlights
While the world population is continuously aging, demand for novel strategies to repair and regenerate damaged and diseased tissues and organs has tremendously grown
The authors defined regenerative medicine (RM) as ‘‘an interdisciplinary field of research and clinical applications focused on the repair, replacement or regeneration of cells, tissues or organs to restore impaired function resulting from any cause, including congenital defects, disease, trauma and aging
Microfluidic devices have already been used as platforms for cell-based screens, in particular for studying fundamental biological processes and for drug testing, owing to advantages they offer over classical cell culture systems: temporal and spatial control over fluids and physical parameters, and integration of sensors to obtain direct and in situ read-out
Summary
Tremendous efforts are placed into development of novel regenerative strategies, involving (stem) cells, soluble factors, biomaterials or combinations thereof, as a result of the growing need caused by continuous population aging. To satisfy this need, fast and reliable assessment of (biological) performance is sought, to select the potentially interesting candidates, and to rule out poor ones at an early stage of development. Besides the complexity of organs or tissues that need to be regenerated, regenerative medicine brings additional challenges of complex regeneration processes and strategies. We aim to investigate whether microfluidics can become widely applied in regenerative medicine research and/or strategies
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