Understanding these relationships will provide a basis for future approaches to the large-scale production of tissue constructs.

• Tissue Engineering deals with fabricating functional tissue from living cells. Cells are seeded in a bio-resorbable matrix to guide tissue development in a 3-dimensional way. The cell-matrix system is cultured for a period of time inside a bioreactor or culture vessel. Ulltimately, the new tissue is implanted into the patient.
• Engineered tissue can be used in patients who are in need of transplantation, eliminating problems such as shortage of donors and immune rejection.
• Several tissue types are in the process of being engineered around the world. Some examples: pancreas, liver, skin, nerves, cornea, breast, bone, blood, muscle, cartilage and blood vessels. There is still a lot to learn about how to optimize the tissue product.
• More than one million patients every year suffer from some form of cartilage damage in the United States. Most of this cartilage damage occurs at the knee. Articular cartilage has a very limited self-repair capacity.
• The engineering of cartilage includes the isolation of young chondrocytes (cartilage cells), seeding on a bio-resorbable porous scaffold, and culturing on a bioreactor under the appropriate conditions. So far, none of the engineered cartilages produced around the world can guarantee to match the performance of natural articular cartilage.
• At BERL, the relationships between the environment provided by bioreactors and the characteristics of the final cartilage product are being studied. Novel bioreactors and culture approaches are being used in an effort to improve the properties of engineered cartilage.