A Tissue Engineering's Guide to Biomimicry

Biomimicry is a broadly used term in many fields such as in architecture and industrial design to pharmacology and many others. Biomimicry tries to replicate a product or process that occurs in the natural environment. However, due to the broad use of the term biomimicry it becomes unclear what is exactly being mimicked. Specifically, in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) where research is focussed on mimicking complex native tissue, the term biomimicry is often used to designate a single aspect. Therefore, in TERM biomimicry can be clustered into to three different categories correlated to the aspect that is being mimicked: i) mechanical - that has a focus on obtaining the correct mechanical properties of a tissue; ii) morphological - that aims at recreating a scaffold that has a similar morphology to its native counterpart; iii) biological - that has a prime focus on recreating the biological microenvironment that is found in the targeted tissue. This review discusses the strategies and methods how these different forms of biomimicry can be achieved with the current techniques available.