Adipose tissue processed for lipoinjection shows increased cellular survival in vitro when tissue engineering principles are applied.

Correcting soft tissue defects by autologous fat grafting is a routine procedure in plastic surgery. Its efficacy and safety has been discussed extensively and several techniques of lipoinjection have been developed. However, one is bound to overcorrect by 30%-70% or need to repeat the procedure because of resorption of the transplant. The reasons are that many of the transplanted cells are already differentiated, and also that there is no nutritional support to the inner cell layers when they are transplanted as fragments. By culturing autologous adipocytes one can ensure that only non-differentiated, but committed, preadipocytes are transplanted and the procedure can be done in a way that ensures optimal nutritional support for the cells. In the present study we have compared our cell culture technique with two common clinical ways of processing liposuction material and found that (pre)adipocytes survive and proliferate significantly better in cell culture.