title: The Self-Assembling Process and Applications in Tissue Engineering.
abstract: Tissue engineering strives to create neotissues capable of restoring function. Scaffold-free technologies have emerged that can recapitulate native tissue function without the use of an exogenous scaffold. This review will survey, in particular, the self-assembling and self-organization processes as scaffold-free techniques. Characteristics and benefits of each process are described, and key examples of tissues created using these scaffold-free processes are examined to provide guidance for future tissue-engineering developments. We aim to explore the potential of self-assembly and self-organization scaffold-free approaches, detailing the recent progress in the in vitro tissue engineering of biomimetic tissues with these methods toward generating functional tissue replacements.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95616.
authors.forename: Jennifer K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95616.
authors.forename: Jarrett M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Link
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95616.
authors.forename: Jerry C Y
authors.initials: JCY
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, California 95616.|Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of California, Davis, California 95616.
authors.forename: Kyriacos A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Athanasiou
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D040761:Biomimetic Materials; D018929:Cell Culture Techniques; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D006801:Humans; D044968:Regenerative Medicine / Q000379:methods*; D023822:Tissue Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D054457:Tissue Scaffolds