Tissue Engineering and Cell-Populated Collagen Matrices

Tissue engineering seeks to produce living,three-dimensional cellular constructs that can be used as clinical replacements of damaged tissues and organs as well as research tools to study cell and matrix interactions that occur in higher-order systems.To organize the cells into a three-dimensional structure in vitro,a provisional extracellular matrix support is required.The two main methods to achieve this are a)to culture the stromal cells on a three-dimensional synthetic meshwork,or else b)embed the cells within a three-dimensional type I collagen lattice.The contracted collagen lattice can be used for a variety of practical applications including the support of epithe- lial growth and differentiation in order to produce a skin replacement (1 –5 ). However,this model system can also be exploited for experiments to study cell-matrix interactions such as the influence of tension on cell phenotype (6 ).