Strategic directions in tissue engineering.

The field of tissue engineering is developing rapidly. Given its ultimate importance to clinical care, the time is appropriate to assess the field's strategic directions to optimize research and development activities. To characterize strategic directions in tissue engineering, a distant but reachable clinical goal was proposed and a worldwide body of 24 leaders in tissue engineering was queried systematically to determine the best paths toward that goal. Using a modified Hoshin process, we identified 14 critical activity categories and then stratified them by their immediate priority for the field. The result of the analysis illustrates a highly interdependent set of activities that are dominated by the need for an understanding of angiogenesis, stem cell science, and the utilization of molecular biology and systems biology tools to enable a deeper comprehension of tissue development and control.