Nanotechnology in Vascular Tissue Engineering: from Nanoscaffolding towards Rapid Vessel Biofabrication

The first clinically successful implantation of tissue engineered blood vessel is now a reality and it is a remarkable historic achievement of tissue engineering science and biotechnology in XXI century. However, existing methods of biofabrications in vascular tissue engineering are still bioreactor-based, extremely expensive, laborious and time consuming and nonautomated which is essential for large scaled economically successful commercialization. Recently, it have been shown that advances in nanotechnology can bring additional functionality in vascular scaffolds, optimize internal vascular graft surface and even help to direct stem cell differentiation into vascular cell phenotype. The development of nanotechnology-based rapid methods of vascular tissue biofabrication as well as magnetic-driven vascular tissue assembly with using nanoparticles-labelled cells represents one of most important recent technological breakthroughs in vascular tissue engineering, because it dramatically accelerates vascular tissue assembly and even eliminates the need of bioreactor-based scaffold cellularization process. Thus, the application of nanotechnology approaches could be very useful in the development of rapid cost-effective automated large scaled industrial vascular tissue biofabrication, but potential superiority of these approaches remains to be proven