Figure 3.

Patient-specific tissue engineering. The recent discovery of iPS technology has offered the potential of patient-specific cell therapy. A small skin biopsy could be obtained from a patient in need of an organ or tissue replacement, from which dermal fibroblasts would be isolated and expanded in vitro. These fibroblasts can then be reprogrammed into iPS cells whose pluripotency could be exploited to differentiate the iPS cells into any patient-specific cell type (i.e., neurons, hepatocytes, etc.). The patient-specific cells can then be incorporated into a biomaterial scaffold and implanted back to the patient at the damaged tissue site.