The Challenge of the Vascularization of Regenerated Tissues

Tissue engineering (TE) technology combines different aspects of medicine, biology, and engineering to generate, repair, or replace human tissues. In particular, the bone TE approach may be used to induce new functional bone regeneration via the synergistic combination of implanted porous ceramic scaffold with bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) in vivo. The efficiency of an artificially implanted construct depends on the timely delivery and exchange of nutrients from blood vessels to the BMSC and the contemporary removal of the metabolism waste products. Therefore, the control of the angiogenesis of the microvascular network with proper spatial organization is a key step to obtain tissue regeneration and repair (Carano and Filvaroff, Drug Discov Today 8:980-989, 2003). In this review, we discuss the fundamentals of bone tissue engineering, highlighting the most recent advances in the understanding of the relation between bone formation and vascularization.