Living Materials for Regenerative Medicine
Yunru Yu, Qiao Wang, Chong Wang, Luoran Shang
Abstract
Regenerative medicine has been attracting tremendous attention during the past few decades because it is promising in overcoming the limitations of donor shortage and immune complications in direct transplantations. The ongoing progress in this field calls for the rapid growth of living materials, which consist of live biological agents and can be designed together with synthetic materials to meet the application demands of regenerative medicine. In this review, we present a summary of the state-of-the-art progress of living materials that are applied in regenerative medicine. We first introduce the advanced engineering approaches that are employed to prepare living materials containing live cells, typically including genetic engineering, cell coating, microfluidics, and bioprinting, etc. Afterwards, we enumerate different application aspects of living materials in regenerative medicine, including tissue scaffold, cell therapy, tissue models, and so on. Finally, we give a concise conclusion and provide a perspective of this field.