title: Engineering of microscale three-dimensional pancreatic islet models in vitro and their biomedical applications.
abstract: Diabetes now is the most common chronic disease in the world inducing heavy burden for the people's health. Based on this, diabetes research such as islet function has become a hot topic in medical institutes of the world. Today, in medical institutes, the conventional experiment platform in vitro is monolayer cell culture. However, with the development of micro- and nano-technologies, several microengineering methods have been developed to fabricate three-dimensional (3D) islet models in vitro which can better mimic the islet of pancreases in vivo. These in vitro islet models have shown better cell function than monolayer cells, indicating their great potential as better experimental platforms to elucidate islet behaviors under both physiological and pathological conditions, such as the molecular mechanisms of diabetes and clinical islet transplantation. In this review, we present the state-of-the-art advances in the microengineering methods for fabricating microscale islet models in vitro. We hope this will help researchers to better understand the progress in the engineering 3D islet models and their biomedical applications such as drug screening and islet transplantation.
authors: a The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education , Xi'an Jiaotong University School of Life Science and Technology , Xi'an , China .|b Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC), Xi'an Jiaotong University , Xi'an , China .|c Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism , Xijing Hospital, Fourth Military Medical University , Xi'an , China .
authors: Bin
authors: B
authors: Gao
authors: a The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education , Xi'an Jiaotong University School of Life Science and Technology , Xi'an , China .|b Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC), Xi'an Jiaotong University , Xi'an , China .
authors: Lin
authors: L
authors: Wang
authors: d Institute of Digestive Disease, Xijing Hospital, Fourth Military Medical University , Xi'an , China , and.
authors: Shuang
authors: S
authors: Han
authors: e Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering , University of Malaya , Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia.
authors: Belinda
authors: B
authors: Pingguan-Murphy
authors: a The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education , Xi'an Jiaotong University School of Life Science and Technology , Xi'an , China .|b Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC), Xi'an Jiaotong University , Xi'an , China .
authors: Xiaohui
authors: X
authors: Zhang
authors: a The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education , Xi'an Jiaotong University School of Life Science and Technology , Xi'an , China .|b Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC), Xi'an Jiaotong University , Xi'an , China .
authors: Feng
authors: F
authors: Xu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D060846:Cell Engineering; D004353:Drug Evaluation, Preclinical; D005109:Extracellular Matrix; D006801:Humans; D007515:Islets of Langerhans
keywords: Cell microenvironment; islet model; microengineering methods; three dimensional