In the last two decades, tissue engineering in academia and industry has become an exciting, multidisciplinary field offering the potential to repair or regenerate injured and diseased musculoskeletal and craniofacial tissues with living tissues. With this activity has come the need to allocate resources and choose among competing approaches. This challenge raises questions about criteria used to assess differing approaches. Which approaches are worth funding and what criteria should be used to monitor their success? Which parameters should be measured and what values should these parameters have? We propose to conduct a 2 ? day conference that will bring together bioengineers, surgeons, biologists, material scientists, and experts in commercial development to: 1) carefully re- examine general and tissue-specific goals for tissue engineering; 2) identify and prioritize criteria and threshold values for the design and evaluation of these tissue engineered repairs; and 3) identify needs in pre-clinical research to more rapidly achieve our goals. The entire group will meet at the beginning of each day to agree on the process for setting goals, criteria, and threshold values, and then at the end of the day to share results so as to identify common features of these parameters across tissue types. Participants will also be assigned to one of six tissue-specific teams (ligament, tendon, bone, articular cartilage, meniscus/TMJ and intervertebral disc) to include at least one bioengineer, surgeon, biologist, and material scientist. Each team will discuss overall goals and clinical needs, evaluative parameters and criteria for evaluating a specific tissue repair, establish where we are relative to these goals and possible threshold values of acceptability, and examine issues of efficacy, surgical handling and attachment, cost to manufacture, and projected times to preclinical and clinical trials. By continually questioning our progress along the way, we should be able to better assess promising tissue engineering approaches, assist funding agencies to most effectively spend their available research dollars in tissue engineering, and speed the development of useful products to clinical use.
| Functional Tissue Engineering Conference Group (2008) Evaluation criteria for musculoskeletal and craniofacial tissue engineering constructs: a conference report. Tissue Eng Part A 14:2089-104 |
