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Selcan Guler. 1 Bioengineering Division, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.
Bahar Aslan. 1 Bioengineering Division, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.
Pezhman Hosseinian. 2 Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine Division, Institute of Science, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.
Halil Murat Aydin. 3 Bioengineering Division, Environmental Engineering Department, Centre for Bioengineering, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.
Address correspondence to: Halil Murat Aydin, PhD, Bioengineering Division, Environmental Engineering Department, Centre for Bioengineering, Hacettepe University, Ankara 06800, Turkey, E-mail: [email protected]
Introduction
Each year, millions of people die or suffer from organ failure and patients await their turn in the long lists to find proper donors for the replacement of failed tissues or organs. Due to insufficient donor sources available for the demand, tissue engineering emerged with a potential for the recovery of damaged tissues and organs with their engineered equivalents.1 Tissue engineering aims to create these functional constructs by using synthetic polymeric, naturally derived, or biological materials with various production methods.2
Eventhough synthetic constructs attract great interest, due to the compatibility issues, they still have some complications following transplantation. On the other hand, naturally derived materials provide high regeneration capacity for the replacement of damaged tissues. Even though naturally derived materials are a good source, the antigens they possess may hold a rejection risk following transplantation.3 The main antigen sources in naturally derived constructs, namely cell membrane and genomic materials, are required to be removed from the tissue to prevent rejection.
Decellularization is a phenomenal technique to obtain biologically compatible naturally derived tissues by removing these antigen sources from tissues.4,5 Physical, chemical, and biological techniques or their combinations can be applied to remove cells and cellular materials from tissues. Until now, a wide range of decellularization agents and their effects on extracellular matrix (ECM) have been proposed.6,7
Chemical agents are mostly preferred for decellularization because of their approved effectiveness upon cell removal. Besides effective cell removal, most of the chemical agents create adverse effects on ECM structure by disrupting the protein-protein interactions irreversibly or by desirably removing the crucial ECM components, such as, collagen, elastin, and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). Notably, excessive exposure to chemical agents results in an ECM with poor structural properties. Therefore, there is an unmet need for a fast and effective methodology that can provide a preserved...