Gastrointestinal disease burden continues to rise in the United States and worldwide. The development of bioengineering strategies to model gut injury or disease and to reestablish functional gut tissue could expand therapeutic options and improve clinical outcomes. Current approaches leverage a rapidly evolving gut bioengineering toolkit aimed at 1) de novo generation of gutlike tissues at multiple scales for microtissue models or implantable grafts and 2) regeneration of functional gut in vivo. Although significant progress has been made in intestinal organoid cultures and engineered tissues, development of predictive in vitro models and effective regenerative therapies remains challenging. In this review, we survey emerging bioengineering tools and recent methodological advances to identify current challenges and future opportunities in gut bioengineering for disease modeling and regenerative medicine.
Keywords: bioengineering; biomaterials; cell therapy; gastrointestinal disease; microphysiological systems; organ-on-chip; organoids; regenerative medicine; stem cells; tissue engineering.