Bioreactors for tissue engineering: An update

One of the greatest puzzles in wound healing is how to substitute or replace the defect caused by loss and damaged tissue or organs. In regenerative medicine, Tissue Engineering has been proposed to supply this demand by generating tissues in vitro. Bioreactors are the key to translate these cells and tissue-based constructs into large-scale biological products that are clinically effective, safe and financially pliable. In this review, we summarise the different up-to-date bioreactor designs being used for different cell types and special design scaffolds, and highlight advantages of different bioreactors, current challenges and the future trends. It is our belief that with efforts combined from multiple disciplinary participants, a novel bioreactor system that is capable of fast, large scale tissue culture would come about in near future.