Approaches to in vitro tissue regeneration with application for human disease modeling and drug development

•Reliable in vitro models for human disease are needed.•Human cell-based models including iPS cell-based models are emerging.•Biomimetic matrices and substrates are crucial to recapitulate microenvironment.•Microfluidics and microfabrication technologies enable dynamic organ models.•Systems biology and multidisciplinary approaches are crucial to drug discovery.

Reliable in vitro human disease models that capture the complexity of in vivo tissue behaviors are crucial to gain mechanistic insights into human disease and enable the development of treatments that are effective across broad patient populations. The integration of stem cell technologies, tissue engineering, emerging biomaterials strategies and microfabrication processes, as well as computational and systems biology approaches, is enabling new tools to generate reliable in vitro systems to study the molecular basis of human disease and facilitate drug development. In this review, we discuss these recently developed tools and emphasize opportunities and challenges involved in combining these technologies toward regenerative science.