Tissue Engineering is the first medical therapy where engineered tissues could potentially become fully integrated within the patient, thus offering a permanent cure for many diseases not curable today. The National Science Foundation (NSF) defined Tissue Engineering in 1988 as the “application of the principles and methods of engineering and life sciences toward fundamental understanding of structure-function relationships in normal and pathological mammalian tissues and the development of biological substitutes to restore, maintain or improve tissue function (Shalak and Fox, 1988). Two decades later, Tissue Engineering/Regenerative Medicine is still a growing and exciting field of research applying knowledge of biology, physiology and cell culture techniques to offer new treatment.
