Tissue and Organ Decellularization Strategies in Regenerative Medicine; Recent Advances, Current Translational Challenges, and Future Directions

Organ transplantation is still the best choice for various forms of end-stage tissue/organ failures to keep patients alive. The mismatch between the supply and clinical demand of transplantable tissues/organs has encouraged the researchers to find more innovative strategies to address this gap. Regenerative medicine holds a great promise to replace or regenerate human cells, tissue or organs for restoring or establishing the normal function lost because of a disease or damage using cells, biomaterials, and different factors alone or in combination. Decellularization, as a tissue engineering approach, is designed to remove cells and debris from tissues and organs while maintaining the biochemical composition, biological activity, three-dimensional organization and integrity of the extracellular matrix, indicating the preservation of native extracellular matrix-contained cues necessary for cells.

Bioartificial tissue and organs based on stem cells seeded on decellularized tissue scaffolds are promising biomaterials for constructing organ substitutes that can be used in clinical therapy. As a technique; decellularization, if successfully done, has many advantages over simple allogenic and xenogeneic transplants. It minimizes or removes the possibility of immune rejection avoiding the need of immunosuppressive drugs administration upon implantation, and a reduced risk of disease transmission. Additionally, this scaffold would allow cell adhesion and provide suitable microenvironment properties to guide cell growth, proliferation and migration and thus to enable the formation of new tissue. Over the last decade, these decellularized scaffolds have gained increasing interest and suggested to serve a number of applications rather than transplantation such as drug screening, and stem cells differentiation studies.

This Research Topic call aims to discover the recent progress in designing and recellularization of decellularized animal and human tissues/organs to engineer a fully transplantable tissue/organ taking into account: the current challenges and the possible clinical applications.

Specifically, we welcome contributions (original articles, reviews, mini-reviews, perspectives) from topics focusing on:
-Optimization of the decellularization techniques of different tissues and organs.
-Bioscaffold recellularization.
-Vascular reconstruction within the decellularized organs.
-Application of decellularized tissue and organ into clinic.
-Stem cell Differentiation using decellularized matrix.
-Extracellular matrix hydrogels from decellularized tissues.
-Decellularized Extracellular matrix as ink for 3D bioprinting.