Abstract
Only limited treatment options are available now in end-stage organ failure, including replacement therapy such as hemodialysis or organ transplantation. In addition, the outcome of these therapeutic approaches is often challenging because of the requirement for longterm technical support, or complicated surgical techniques and life-long immune suppression, respectively. Moreover, donor shortage provides only limited outcome to patients who are in long waiting list. Therefore, new methods to facilitate recovery from such organ failure are highly desirable. Regenerative therapy could be an option in this regard. Recent progress in the field of tissue engineering has opened attractive approaches for clinical applications of regenerative medicine, including the use of microfluidics, bioreactors or organoid constructs. Of these, tissue decellularization technology, which retains all the necessary cues for cell maintenance and homeostasis, such as the three dimensional structure of the organ and its extracellular matrix(ECM) components, has recently been applied to whole organs. It has demonstrated efficacy for generating an engineered graft which is transplantable by vascular anastomosis. In this review, we focus on tissue decellularization as a new bioengineering approach, most recently for whole organs, that has been applied for liver fabrication.
