Whitaker Education Summit White Paper
Education for Careers in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
Linda Griffith, MIT, Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering
Melody Swartz, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Integrative
Biosciences Institute
Robert Tranquillo, University of Minnesota, Biomedical Engineering
Overview of Tissue Engineering
Broadly defined, tissue engineering is the process of creating living, functional, 3D
tissues and organs starting with populations of individual cells (Griffith & Naughton 2002,
Saltzman 2004). Coaxing cells to form tissue is inherently an engineering process, as they need
physical support (typically in the form of some sort of 3D scaffold) as well as chemical and
mechanical signals provided at appropriate times and places to form the structures and achieve
the functions that characterize native tissue. Further, the process of forming tissues from cells is
a highly orchestrated set of events that occur over time scales ranging from seconds to weeks and
dimensions ranging from 0.0001 cm — 10 cm.
The most well recognized applications of tissue engineering involve therapies for an
array of clinical problems, from diabetes and heart failure to bone and cartilage repair. The goal
is to create new tissue either directly in the patient via cell transplantation or directed growth
from endogenous healthy tissue, or by growing tissue outside the body for transplantation into
the patient. Cells may be derived from the patient or from a donor, and may be pure or mixed
populations of differentiated cell types; stem cells derived from the adult tissue; or embryonic
stem cells (capable of both self renewal and differentiation into a variety of cell lineages); or a
mixture of cells at different stages of maturation (that would also include rare stem and
progenitor cells).
Although less heralded than the direct clinical applications, tissue engineering is
emerging as a potentially powerful tool in another arena --- in