Cell-sheet engineering using intelligent surfaces

The possibility of recreating various tissues and organs for the purpose of regenerative medicine has received much interest. However, the field of tissue engineering has been restricted by the limitations of conventional approaches. A method to circumvent the need for traditional scaffold-based technologies is cell-sheet engineering, which uses temperature-responsive culture dishes. These surfaces, which are created by grafting the temperature-responsive polymer poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) onto ordinary culture dishes, enable the non-invasive harvesting of cells as intact sheets by simple temperature reduction. This article reviews current research on the applications of cell-sheet engineering for the reconstruction of various tissues, as well as the intelligent surfaces used by this novel technology.