Tissue Engineering Chambers: Potential Clinical Uses and Limitations

Oxygen delivery is the greatest limiting factor to large-volume tissue engineering. Regenerating post-mastectomy breast tissue requires avascular adipose tissue to be transferred as thin “micro-ribbons” to avoid central necrosis (Khouri et al., 2014). Similarly, scaffold-based constructs lack the central vascularity necessary for large-volume tissue regeneration (Post et al., 2013). The tissue engineering chamber (TEC) induces the recipient bed to regenerate fully vascularized tissue in vivo, thereby providing the oxygen delivery necessary to support large-scale tissue regeneration. In the above article (Morrison et al., 2016), Morrison and colleagues describe the first successful use of TEC to generate well-vascularized, large-volume human adipose tissue in vivo. While TEC-based constructs do not have the same ability as scaffold-based constructs to control the internal structures of regenerated tissues, they still have potential utility in certain clinical scenarios.