Building off-the-shelf tissue-engineered composites

Rapid advances in technology have created the realistic possibility of personalized medicine. In 2000, Time magazine listed tissue engineering as one of the 'hottest 10 career choices'. However, in the past decade, only a handful of tissue-engineered products were translated to the clinical market and none were financially viable. The reality of complex business planning and the high-investment, high-technology environment was not apparent, and the promise of tissue engineering was overstated. In the meantime, biologists were steadily applying three-dimensional benchtop tissue-culture systems for cellular research, but the systems were gelatinous and thus limited in their ability to facilitate the development of complex tissues. Now, the bioengineering literature has seen an emergence of literature describing biofabrication of tissues and organs. However, if one looks closely, again, the viable products appear distant. 'Rapid' prototyping to reproduce the intricate patterns of whole organs using large volumes of cellular components faces daunting challenges. Homogenous forms are being labelled 'tissues', but, in fact, do not represent the heterogeneous structure of the native biological system. In 2003, we disclosed the concept of combining rapid prototyping techniques with tissue engineering technologies to facilitate precision development of heterogeneous complex tissue-test systems, i.e. systems to be used for drug discovery and the study of cellular behaviour, biomedical devices and progression of disease. The focus of this paper is on the challenges we have faced since that time, moving this concept towards reality, using the case of breast tissue as an example.