CULTURE OF ORGANIZED CELL COMMUNITIES

Cells cultured in vitro will tend to retain their differentiated pheno type under conditions that resemble their natural in vivo environment, for example, when cultured on polymer scaffolds in tissue culture bio reactors. In this chapter, we define organized cell communities as thr ee-dimensional in vitro grown cell-polymer constructs that display imp ortant structural and functional features of the natural tissue. We re view representative studies in which the research goal was to culture organized cell communities resembling cartilage, bone, skeletal muscle or cardiac-like tissue. These constructs can potentially serve as tis sue equivalents for in vivo transplantation or as a model system for t he in vitro testing of cell and tissue-level responses to molecular, m echanical or genetic manipulations. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.