Abstract
Chronic respiratory diseases remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The only option at end-stage disease is lung transplantation, but there are not enough donor lungs to meet clinical demand. Alternative options to increase tissue availability for lung transplantation are urgently required to close the gap on this unmet clinical need. A growing number of tissue engineering approaches are exploring the potential to generate lung tissue ex vivo for transplantation. Both biologically derived and manufactured scaffolds seeded with cells and grown ex vivo have been explored in pre-clinical studies, with the eventual goal of generating functional pulmonary tissue for transplantation. Recently, there have been significant efforts to scale-up cell culture methods to generate adequate cell numbers for human scale bioengineering approaches. Concomitantly, there have been exciting efforts in designing bioreactors which allow for appropriate cell seeding and development of functional lung tissue over time. This review aims to present the current state-of-the-art progress for each of the areas above and to discuss promising new ideas within the field of lung bioengineering.
Footnotes
This manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the European Respiratory Journal. It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJ online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article.
Conflict of interest: Dr. De Santis has nothing to disclose.
Conflict of interest: Dr. Bölükbas has nothing to disclose.
Conflict of interest: Sandra Lindstedt
Conflict of interest: Dr. Wagner reports grants from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, grants from German Lung Center, during the conduct of the study; In addition, Dr. Wagner has a patent WO2014169111 A1 pending.
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