Human Textiles: a cell-synthesized yarn as a truly “bio” material for tissue engineering applications.

Abstract In the field of tissue engineering, many groups have come to rely on the extracellular matrix produced by cells as the scaffold that provides structure and strength to the engineered tissue. We have previously shown that sheets of cell-assembled extracellular matrix (CAM), which are entirely biological yet robust, can be mass-produced for clinical applications using normal, adult, human fibroblasts. In this article, we demonstrate that CAM yarns can be generated with a range of physical and mechanical properties. We show that this material can be used as a simple suture to close a wound or can be assembled into fully biological, human, tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVG) that have high mechanical strength and are implantable. By combining this truly “bio” material with a textile-based assembly, this original tissue engineering approach is highly versatile and can produce a variety of strong human textiles that can be readily integrated in the body.