Further Reading
Journals, reference books and open resources for anyone who wants to go deeper into tissue engineering and bioelectricity.
Reference books
- Principles of Tissue Engineering, edited by Robert Lanza, Robert Langer and Joseph Vacanti – the standard reference work of the field, revised over several editions.
- Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach by Robert Plonsey and Roger Barr – a classic textbook covering membranes, action potentials and the electrocardiogram.
- Biomaterials Science: An Introduction to Materials in Medicine, edited by Buddy Ratner and colleagues – a broad introduction to the materials used in implants and scaffolds.
Journals
Peer-reviewed research in the field is spread across engineering, biology and clinical journals. Useful starting points include Tissue Engineering (Parts A, B and C), Biomaterials, Acta Biomaterialia, Nature Biomedical Engineering and the Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. Review articles in the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering are a good way to get an overview of a sub-field before reading the primary literature.
Free resources
- PubMed and PubMed Central – searchable abstracts and many free full-text articles in biomedicine.
- Open courseware from universities, which often includes lecture notes on cell biology, biomechanics and bioinstrumentation.
- Professional societies such as the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS), which publish meeting reports and educational material.
Where to start
For a newcomer, the most efficient route is usually a recent review article followed by one or two chapters of a reference book on the specific tissue of interest. Reviews give the vocabulary and the main research groups; textbooks explain the underlying cell biology and materials science that papers take for granted. After that, reading the methods sections of a few primary papers is the best way to understand what experiments in the field really involve.
How to read a paper in this field
Check what kind of evidence is reported: cells in a dish, an animal model or human patients. Results in each category answer different questions, and progress from one to the next often takes years. Look at the size of the effect and the number of samples, not only at the conclusion in the abstract. And be wary of press coverage that turns an early laboratory result into a promise of a treatment “in five years”.
More to read
Growing Bone in the Lab
How scaffolds, stem cells and bioreactors are combined to build living bone grafts, and why the field is harder than it looks.
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Engineering Heart Tissue
Heart muscle does not regrow after a heart attack. Engineered cardiac tissue is being developed both as a future repair material and, already today, as a model for testing drugs.
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Bioelectricity: A Course Outline
Many cells in the body respond to electrical signals, and the body itself generates electricity every second. A sketch of how an introductory course on the subject can be structured.
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