Tissue Engineering

Despite the range of reconstructive options and technologies available to today’s plastic surgeons being unprecedented in history, there are still numerous unmet clinical needs. Tissue engineering has long-offered to provide new tissues and organs to not only meet these needs but to transform existing practice. Today there are a significant number of tissue engineered products available for use in clinical practice and the pace of change in this area is accelerating. Stem cell subpopulation profiling, nanotechnology, and Crispr-Cas9 gene editing are just some of the new and promising technologies that will provide further advances in tissue engineering. We examine the field of tissue engineering as it relates to plastic surgery, provide updates on current and emerging technologies and highlight the role of plastic surgeons as clinicians, clinician researchers, and advocates for our patients and the community with regard to the regulation of new tissue engineering technologies.