Tissue engineering is becoming increasingly successful with authentically representing the actual environmental milieu of the development, regeneration and disease. The paradigm of tissue engineering is related to the integrated use of human cells, biomaterial scaffolds (structural and logistic templates for tissue formation) and bioreactors (culture systems providing environmental control, molecular and physical signaling) in regenerative medicine. Living human tissues can be bioengineered from the autologous stem cells, and tailored to the patient and the medical condition being treated. More recently, the same principles are being successfully applied to the patient-specific “organs on a chip” platforms designed to recapitulate some aspects of human physiology. This talk will discuss some recent advances in regenerative engineering and modeling of disease using functional human tissues grown in lab.

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is The Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Sciences at Columbia University in the City of New York.