Tissue engineering--body parts from the Petri dish

The development of methods to regenerate human tissues and organs by tissue engineering (TE), will have a dramatic influence on many medical specialities in the future. The essence of plastic surgery is to reconstruct disrupted and damaged tissues by the use of a plethora of techniques spanning from small local skin flaps to highly advanced microsurgery and free composite grafts. However, these methods only focus on moving tissue from one part of the patient to another without actual regeneration. To be able to take the next step in development of the speciality it is of necessity to address this issue. Hence it follows naturally that plastic surgeons lead and represent the driving force of the development within the research of tissue engineering. In this paper we would like to present active research and also give an overview of areas in tissue engineering that are of special interest to the plastic surgeon.