The history of the use of artificial tissues as a substitute for compromised tissue is born in the eighties, when they were put in place the conditions to expand the keratinocytes, the cells of the epidermis that is, to reconstruct in the laboratory flaps of tissue to be transplanted into patients who had suffered burns. From a small skin biopsy of the patient are isolated keratinocytes, cultivated in a test tube until the formation of a package that can be transplanted on the surface burned. Other interesting applications have focused on the reconstruction of the corneal epithelium of patients who had undergone thermal or chemical burns to the eye. More recently the interest of scientists turned to the regeneration and repair of skeletal tissues, bone and cartilage, through the use of cells isolated from the bone marrow, respectively, or from a small biopsy of cartilage. In the case of large bone defects, the regenerative ability of the bone is insufficient to ensure the repair of the lesion and the current therapeutic techniques of transplantation of autologous bone or from donor have limitations. Stromal cells derived from bone marrow can in these cases represent a suitable cell type in the regeneration of bone tissue, given their osteogenic potential. There are also numerous studies related to the use of cartilage cells, chondrocytes for the repair of cartilage lesions. The progress achieved by encouraging scientific research have opened new possibilities in the use of tissue engineering for the treatment of diabetes, the regeneration of cardiac muscle tissue when the heart is damaged by a heart attack and the use of endothelial cells for the coating of implants vascular. Even the nerve cells destroyed by degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease could be replaced by the use of cell therapy.
