Skip to main content

Biomimetic microenvironment for regenerative medicine

Guest edited by Ho-Wook Jun (University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA) and Hak-Joon Sung (Vanderbilt University, USA)

One of the important strategies for regenerative medicine is to provide a nurturing and protective microenvironment like the extracellular matrix (ECM) that plays a key role in tissue development and regeneration. Cells interact with their own ECM as well as with the ECM from other cells via specific receptors on their membrane surface. The interactions between cells and the ECM control differentiation, migration, and proliferation as well as tissue remodeling. For this reason, an ECM mimicking microenvironment has been designed by incorporating various moieties and features derived from the ECM. Cells also respond differently to physicochemical and mechanical properties of the microenvironment.

This series, published in Biomaterials Research, covers state-of-the-art engineering technologies that have been used for development of biomimetic microenvironments in the fields of stem cell engineering, biomimetic topography on cellular mechanosensitivity, and genetically engineered humanized microenvironments in animal models.

Read the author blog "Multiplexing human stem cell research in mice" to learn more about the article on multiple genetically engineered humanized microenvironments in a single mouse.

  1. T cells play a central role in immune-homeostasis; specifically in the induction of antigen-specific adaptive immunity against pathogens and mutated self with immunological memory. The thymus is the unique org...

    Authors: Kyung-Ho Roh and Krishnendu Roy
    Citation: Biomaterials Research 2016 20:20
  2. Contamination of biomedical devices in a biological medium, biofouling, is a major cause of infection and is entirely avoidable. This mini-review will coherently present the broad range of antifouling strategi...

    Authors: Vinod B. Damodaran and N. Sanjeeva Murthy
    Citation: Biomaterials Research 2016 20:18
  3. Regenerative endodontics has been proposed to replace damaged and underdeveloped tooth structures with normal pulp-dentin tissue by providing a natural extracellular matrix (ECM) mimicking environment; stem ce...

    Authors: Sagar N. Kaushik, Bogeun Kim, Alexander M. Cruz Walma, Sung Chul Choi, Hui Wu, Jeremy J. Mao, Ho-Wook Jun and Kyounga Cheon
    Citation: Biomaterials Research 2016 20:14
  4. Cardiac fibrosis occurs naturally after myocardial infarction. While the initially formed fibrotic tissue prevents the infarcted heart tissue from rupture, the progression of cardiac fibrosis continuously expa...

    Authors: Zhaobo Fan and Jianjun Guan
    Citation: Biomaterials Research 2016 20:13
  5. Extracellular mechanophysical signals from both static substrate cue and dynamic mechanical loading have strong potential to regulate cell functions. Most of the studies have adopted either static or dynamic c...

    Authors: Mohammad Nahid Andalib, Yuris Dzenis, Henry J. Donahue and Jung Yul Lim
    Citation: Biomaterials Research 2016 20:11