Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of death in developed countries. Regenerative medicine has the potential to drastically improve treatment for advanced HF. Stem cell-based medicine has received attention as a promising candidate therapy over the past decade; however, it has not yet realized this potential in terms of reliability. The cell sheet is an innovative technology for constructin...

The imperfections of scaffold materials have hindered the clinical application of cartilage tissue engineering. The recently developed cell-sheet technique is adopted to engineer tissues without scaffold materials, thus is considered being potentially able to overcome the problems concerning the scaffold imperfections. This study constructed monolayer and bilayer chondrocyte cell sheets and har...

In cell or tissue engineering, it is essential to develop a support for cell-to-cell adhesion, which leads to the generation of cell sheets connected by extracellular matrix. Such supports must be hydrophobic and should result in a detachable cell sheet. A thermoresponsive support that enables the cultured cell sheet to detach using only a change in temperature could be an interesting alternati...

Cell sheet technology has emerged as an important tissue engineering approach. Adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) have valuable applications in regenerative medicine, but their stemness and differentiation capabilities in the cell sheet format have not been well investigated. In this study, we found that l-ascorbate 2-phosphate (A2-P), a stable form of ascorbic acid, significantly enhanced ASC p...

Fundamental biological processes including morphogenesis, tissue repair and tumour metastasis require collective cell motions1–3, and to drive these motions cells exert traction forces on their surroundings4. Current understanding emphasizes that these traction forces arise mainly in ‘leader cells’ at the front edge of the advancing cell sheet5–9. Our data are contrary to that assumption and sh...

Light sheet-based fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) is emerging as a powerful imaging technique for the life sciences. LSFM provides an exceptionally high imaging speed, high signal-to-noise ratio, low level of photo-bleaching, and good optical penetration depth. This unique combination of capabilities makes light sheet-based microscopes highly suitable for live imaging applications. Here, we prov...

Tissue engineering using whole, intact cell sheets has shown promise in many cell-based therapies. However, current systems for the growth and release of these sheets can be expensive to purchase or difficult to fabricate, hindering their widespread use. Here, we describe a new approach to cell sheet release surfaces based on silicone oil-infused polydimethylsiloxane. By coating the surfaces wi...

INTRODUCTION Cartilage is one of the most important bodily components in allowing one to walk painlessly. It is the connective tissue in your joints, providing smooth articulations and minimalizing friction between bones. Injuries to this tissue are very common and can be detrimental if not treated, due to its lack of intrinsic healing ability. There exist various known causes of cartilage inju...

Recently, cell-based therapies, regenerative medicine, and tissue engineering have been progressing rapidly. With the injection of single cell suspensions, the injected cells are expected to remain around the damaged host tissues for the maintenance and recovery of native functions. Injections of bone marrow cells have been applied in many ways, and achieved some good clinical results. However,...

Cartilage damage is typically treated by chondrocyte transplantation, mosaicplasty, or microfracture. Recent advances in tissue engineering have prompted research on techniques to repair articular cartilage damage using a variety of transplanted cells. We studied the repair and regeneration of cartilage damage using layered chondrocyte sheets prepared in a temperature-responsive culture dish. W...