CHAPTER 4: Cell Electrospinning and Technology Transfer from Lab to Market Scale

Tissue engineering provides a unique approach to personalized medicine for the repair and replacement of diseased, damaged or ageing tissues and organs. Tissue engineering methodologies have undergone a rapid evolution over the past decade, but tissue-engineered products have not yet entered the marketplace. This is something that can be directly attributed to the relatively recent development of approaches such as cell electrospinning, relative to the timescale of the commercialization pathway for new technologies. This chapter assesses the market potential of cell electrospinning, making comparisons with competing tissue engineering techniques to establish why cell electrospinning is the tissue engineering method of choice for tissue replacement in humans. We propose that the key criteria necessary for the successful application of cell electrospinning in a commercially-relevant context can be distilled into two critical aspects: (i) defining the suitable biopolymers within which to suspend the cells and (ii) ensuring that rigorous testing is carried out prior to the replacement of diseased or damaged tissues with engineered structures that are truly equivalent to the native tissues they are intended to replace.