Tissue engineering and wound healing: an overview of the past, present, and future.

 Tissue engineering is described as the application of principles and methods of engineering and biology toward fundamental understanding of structure-function relationships in normal and pathological mammalian tissue. With this in mind, interest in applying tissue engineering in the evolving field of wound healing arose in the nineties of the previous century. This review provides an overview of the history and technique of tissue engineering, current wound healing related research, description of available tissue-engineered wound dressings, and future challenges.