Stem Cells Based Modeling with the Application in Tissue Engineering and Biomaterial Evaluation

Dear Colleagues,

Stem cells have gained great attention in the field of drug discovery and regenerative medicine in recent years. The main advantage of technology, the ability to produce an identical copy of itself, and multipotency, i.e., the ability to generate cells different from itself, are fundamental characteristics of a stem cell. These are unique qualities that have allowed application in various diseases/disorders and medical challenges in both academia and industry—for instance, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, cancer, spinal cord injury, wound healing, and organ transplantation.

The prospect of performing high-throughput drug screening is aimed at the proliferation, directed differentiation, and toxicity and efficacy studies using stem cells. This seems to be a reliable platform for the drug discovery process. The discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) derived from normal or diseased tissue (human and animal) serves as a platform to perform drug screening aimed at developing cell-based therapies against conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.

There are various research areas in which stem cell technology could make substantial contributions to the development and implementation of stem-cell-based models for toxicity testing. Increased use of human in vitro models of toxicity could reduce the use of animals in safety and risk assessment studies and offers the potential to dramatically enhance our understanding of the molecular basis of toxicity, leading to improved human models and assays for predicting biological response to drugs and environmental hazards.

Biomaterials are the substances, applied in various fields of medicines which are used to stay in constant contact with body tissues. The most frequently practiced example is tooth filling where most people first encounter biomaterials. The other most delicate examples like cardiac repair with heart valves, and joint replacements. Various categories of biomaterials have now been successfully developed and used for more than a generation. First-generation biomaterials largely depended on being inert, or relatively inert, with minimal tissue response. Despite the wide application and its usefulness in human health, nonspecific host immune response is always a challenge to encounter which are prone to infections. Modern biomaterials science provides a large array of biomaterial designs and surface modifications that modulate the host–material interactions to prevent an aggressive foreign-body response and at the same time avoid bacterial colonization. Furthermore, the use of biological motives in the new generations of biomaterials may elicit a specific immune response. Our special issue will cover following main aspects of the biomaterial application and characterization and proposition of new biomaterial, which could be animal and synthetic origin with less host-tissue immune responses.

• New methods and protocol to develop to characterize the animal, human and synthetic origin tissues
• Interaction of cells / stem cells and materials at the microenvironment
• Materials as model systems for stem cell growth and modulation into tissue specific cells
• (Nano)materials and (nano)systems for therapeutic delivery
• biomimetic materials, including biologically inspired cell-inspired synthetic tools

Dr. Saima Imran
Guest Editor

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• stem cells
• biomaterial
• biocompatibility
• regenerative medicine
• tissue engineering
• acellular matrix
• decellularization
• disease modeling