Scaffold Free Tissue Engineering in Regenerative Medicine: A Review

With the rapid progress in the understanding of stem cell biology during the 1990s, the clinical use of stem cells seems to be promising. Recently, novel therapeutics using tissue engineering and stem cell technology, termed regenerative medicine, have been investigated. Cell sheet technology enables novel approaches to tissue engineering without the use of biodegradable scaffolds. Cell sheet technology consists of a temperature responsive culture dish, which enables reversible cell adhesion to and detachment from the dish surface by controllable hydrophobicity of the surface. This allows for noninvasive harvest of cultured cells as an intact monolayer cell sheet including deposited extracellular matrices. The monolayer cell sheet can be transplanted to host tissues without using biodegradable scaffolds and sutures. This paper highlights the various role of cell sheet engineering in periodontics and other tissues.