Long-term and short-term preservation strategies for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine products: state of the art and emerging trends

There is an ever-growing need of human tissues and organs for transplantation. However, the availability of such tissues and organs is insufficient by a large margin, which is a huge medical and societal problem. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) represent potential solutions to this issue and have therefore been attracting increased interest from researchers and clinicians alike. But the successful large-scale clinical deployment of TERM products critically depends on the development of efficient preservation methodologies. The existing preservation approaches such as slow freezing, vitrification, dry state preservation, and hypothermic and normothermic storage all have issues that somehow limit the biomedical applications of TERM products. In this review, the principles and application of these approaches will be summarized, highlighting their advantages and limitations in the context of TERM products preservation.