[Research progress of cell sheet technology and its applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine]

Cell sheet engineering is an important technology to harvest the cultured cells in the form of confluent monolayers using a continuous culture method and a physical approach. Avoiding the use of enzymes, expended cells can be harvested together with endogenous extracellular matrix, cell-matrix contacts, and cell-cell contacts. With high efficiency of cell loading ability and without using exogenous scaffolds, cell sheet engineering has several advantages over traditional tissue engineering methods. In this article, we give an overview on cell sheet technology about its applications in the filed of tissue regeneration, including the construction of soft tissues (corneal, mucous membrane, myocardium, blood vessel, pancreas islet, liver, bladder and skin) and hard tissues (bone, cartilage and tooth root). This techonoly is promising to provide a novel strategy for the development of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. And further works should be carried out on the operability of this technology and its feasibility to construct thick tissues.