Tissue engineering

A research team from the UCL Tissue Repair and Engineering Centre (TREC), the UCL Eastman Dental Institute and the UCL Institute of Orthopaedics, has pioneered a novel technique for engineering tissues, which has the capacity to greatly reduce the time taken to fabricate implantable human tissue.

Tissue engineering is a method whereby the patient has cells extracted from his or her body and grown under laboratory conditions for a myriad of applications such as cartilage, skin grafts, heart valves and tendons, without the risk of rejection, infection or the ethical dilemma involved in transplanting a donated organ.

Current tissue engineering methods depend on the ability of the cultured cells themselves to grow new tissue around a cell scaffold, which is slow, expensive and has limited success. Professor Brown’s process is cell-independent, the controlled engineering of scaffolds is achieved by rapidly removing fluid from hyper-hydrated collagen gels.

The fluid is removed by employing plastic compression, a process that the team found produces dense, cellular, mechanically strong collagen structures that can be controlled at nano and micro scales and which mimic biochemical processes.