Closing the gap: Toward functional, bioengineered esophageal grafts.

In a recent Nature Biotechnology paper, Pablo De Coppi et al. integrate tissue engineering with organ transplantation in a porcine model. They demonstrate that microinjection of autologous myogenic precursors and fibroblasts into a decellularized porcine scaffold, followed by bioreactor maturation, yields a graft that functionally integrates with the native esophagus.