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Intro: Welcome, everyone, to module one: the basics of tissue engineering.

What is tissue engineering?

There are so many feats of engineering around us. Take a look, nationwide transport systems, water supply networks, your electronics, and the mechanical instruments you take for granted - all made by the back-breaking work of engineers. But take a look again, this time down at your feet, and realise the engineering of the human body. After all, engineering isn’t just what’s around us, it’s also about what’s in us. You’ve heard of the seemingly unrealistic tales of growing things outside of bodies: Man grows an ear on arm, scientists grow a heart, growing muscle from tissue. Well guess what? it’s true, and it’s here thanks to tissue engineering.

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So, what exactly is tissue engineering? Well, think about all the wonders tissue engineering can do, how many lives that can be saved both literally and figuratively (in the sense that people can’t function without certain limbs such as a runner without any legs).

It's the in vitro, out of the body, fabrication of functional tissues for in vivo, in the body, implantation. Simply put, you’re growing tissues in a lab and putting them back into a body!

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Who are tissue engineers?

Tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary field involving materials science, engineering, chemistry, biology, and medicine. So, just who are tissue engineers? Tissue engineers encompass a broad range of professions that aren’t just bioengineers.

Engineers are professionals who utilize science and math to design and make things.

Second are physicians or medical practitioners. What they do is evaluate the condition of the patient and give them a diagnostic.

Next are cell biologists, experts who study structure and the behavior of cells.

Next are materials scientists. They are professionals who study and analyze the chemical properties and structure of the man-made and natural materials.

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Second to last are developmental biologists, who study how organisms grow and develop.

Finally, are physiologists, who in my opinion are the most common profession that comes to mind when I hear "tissue engineering". Physiologists are experts who deal with the normal function of living organisms.

With all of these professions combined, you get tissue engineers!

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Why tissue engineering?

So at this point you might be wondering: why? What is the use for tissue engineering, and what can it do for me? To begin, tissue engineering can help with organ failure and damaged tissue that could have occurred from disease, surgery, or extensive trauma. The reason why tissue engineering is studied is to overcome the limitations of current treatments. Some tissue donation limitations that we face include tissue availability, donor site morbidity, immune rejection, and disease transmission. Tissue availability refers to the amount of donors that are able donate the available tissue. Donor site morbidity are the complications that occur at the donation site of the tissue. Immune rejection is when the recipient's body tries to reject the tissue, and disease transmission is the worry that the donor’s tissue may have some underlying problem that wasn’t noticed beforehand.

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Successes of Tissue Engineering:

So, successes of tissue engineering. The first of which you’ve probably heard of is the mouse with an ear growing on its back. This event happened in 1997, 24 years ago. Despite this already being an incredible feat, since then, tissue engineering has only progressed further. In 2008, Dr. Birchall’s lab grew and transplanted the first trachea. In 2006, Dr. Atala grew a bladder, and just a few years ago in 2019 the first tissue engineered tracheal splint was grown and successfully transplanted by Dr. Hollister and Dr. Green at the University of Michigan.