Tissue Engineering: Key into the Future

Tissue engineering has become the new era in dentistry. It is the application of the principles and methods of engineering and the life sciences towards the fundamental understanding of structure/function relationships in normal and pathological mammalian tissues and the development of biological substitutes to restore, maintain, or improve functions. The rapidly expanding fields of stem cell research and Tissue engineering are now converging to form the new discipline of regenerative medicine, the aim of which is to restore normal structure and function of the periodontal tissue. Achieving and maintaining an integrated assembly of fully differentiated mature cell phenotypes throughout the in vitro and post implantation in vivo stages are major challenges to Tissue engineering. As an interdisciplinary endeavour, tissue engineering brings the power of modern biological, chemical and physical science to real clinical problems.