As I consider the the essential challenges of tissue engineering, particularly tissue regrowth, I have settled on a few key cellular capabilities desirable for a regrowth-aiding cell population — at least partial independence from extant environmental signals limiting growth, proliferation at rates beyond those typical for that tissue, and integration into environments which are at least initially hostile. Interestingly enough, to me these sound an awful lot like the characteristics of cancerous growths.
With that in mind, perhaps we can learn lessons from tumors in the development of tissue engineering techniques. Cancers display a number of mutations for dealing with the above issues — reducing apoptosis, altering transmembrane receptors in the growth factor pathways, upregulating energy recruitment, reducing molecular barriers to continued G1-stage growth, and modification of extracellular matrix components to improve survivability in and adherence to atypical environments.
Techniques already exist for producing tumors from regular tissues by genetic modification leading to the acquisition of these traits, perhaps such techniques could be used on cell samples for the development of allo or autografts. Obviously we wouldn’t want to simply grow tumors in the place of damaged tissue, so some we would have to find a happy medium between increased survival and rampant, undifferentiated growth. From a more traditional materials perspective, “we don’t want to have too much material,” so ultimately growth-limiters (chemotherapeutics, or retroviral neoplastic behavior limitation) might have to be used to keep matters under control.
Furthermore, even if properly-differentiated tissue cannot be made to reproduce in a tumor-like manner, it may still be valuable to encourage the selective growth of improperly-differentiated regions in order to “seed” or establish regions of at least minimal tissue viability that could serve as launch pads for more traditional growth by providing at least basic angiogenic aid and signal-transference. It bears more thought, since a lot can go wrong with genetic tomfoolery, and I don’t recall ever reading of tumor-like cells used as a regenerative aid, so I doubt there’s good materials-characterization of such cells beyond anatomical structure.
