John Ramshaw , CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, Bayview Avenue, Clayton, Victoria, AU, 3169 | Tatsuya Shimizu | Shuguang Zhang

Tissue regeneration is a paradigm that is emerging in health care for the treatment of diseased and damaged tissues. Tissue regeneration seeks to develop materials and material-cell constructs that will enable or persuade the body to heal and repair itself, through recruiting, programming and localizing cells to their target tissue. The use of biomaterials as cell carriers or cells aggregates, especially cell sheets, have distinct advantages compared to direct injection of suspensions of cells for regenerative therapies. These strategies open up enormous possibilities to meet specific unmet clinical needs, especially for the repair of diseased or damaged organs and functional tissues. This symposium will focus on development of new materials and surfaces, as cell carriers and for production of cell sheets and the applications of these materials and cell constructs. The development of these advanced materials and cell-material constructs requires an integrated multi-disciplinary approach, which has a strong chemical input. The Symposium will also examine the importance of the levels of intrinsic information content of materials in a tissue regeneration system, and how this can this influence the extent of regeneration of native tissue structure and function as opposed to production of fibrous tissue lacking key functionality.