With public finances tight, governments around the world are demanding a return on their investment in science. Researchers should get used to it.
17 May, 2011
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a versatile model organism that has been used in biomedical research for over a century to study a broad range of phenomena. There are many technical advantages of using Drosophila over vertebrate models; they are easy and inexpensive to culture in laboratory conditions, have a much shorter life cycle, they produce large numbers of externally laid embryos and they can be genetically modified in numerous ways.
16 May, 2011
Due to the limited ability of the adult lung to regenerate and the frequency of lung disease, the lung is a tissue that can especially benefit from regenerative medicine. Prospects for lung regeneration have made great strides in the past year. In this review, we summarize recent progress and key challenges for approaches in lung regenerative medicine.
16 May, 2011
There are several approaches for forming three-dimensional tissues or organs, however in keeping with the demand for living microenvironments, advanced jet-based sciences have demonstrated the least number of steps (pre- and post-processing) required for directly forming multi-cellular three-dimensional, fully functional constructs.
16 May, 2011
Regenerative medicine holds enormous promise for the repair or replacement of organ systems where there are no treatments available other than conventional organ transplantation. For the millions of patients worldwide who are living with end stage lung disease, there is a huge discrepancy between the small quantity of donor lungs available, and the number of patients who are desperately waiting for a transplant.
16 May, 2011
A long-standing limitation in tissue engineering has been the dogmatic reliance on synthetic scaffolds for building tissues with significant mechanical functions despite their deleterious effects (inflammation, scarring, infection, etc.). Tissue engineering by self-assembly (TESA) is a novel approach that relies on the cell's ability to produce natural extracellular matrix.
16 May, 2011
Electrospinning is one of the most successful means of producing nanofibers with enormous application potential. New methods of producing nanofibers without high voltages are presently being explored by researchers around the globe. In the present work, a facile method of producing aligned and crimped fibers with polycaprolactone by rotating the needle assembly is described.
16 May, 2011