Tissue engineering

Tissue engineering is the process of manipulating cellular and/or scaffold material, biological or synthetic, in order to produce tissue analogs, either in vivo or in vitro. It is also one of the most dynamic fields within the domains of biotechnology and medicine. Tissue engineering is all pervasive; attempts have been made to tissue engineer almost every organ, from the bladder to bone, and from the heart to cartilage. In this review, recent efforts to tissue engineer structures of the cardiovascular system - vascular grafts, cardiac valves, and myocardium - will be explored