The newly emerging field of pediatric engineering: Innovation for our next generation.

Neonates, infants, and children have unique physiology and body surface areas that dramatically change during growth and development, and the substantial diversity of complicated pediatric illnesses and rare childhood diseases are distinct from the adult sphere. Unfortunately, medical innovation is generally constrained to retrofitting adult treatment strategies for this heterogeneous population. This conventional, but limited, approach ignores the dynamic biopsychosocial, growth, and developmental complexities that abound, as one progresses through this life cycle from newborn onward toward early adulthood. Forward-thinking solutions are essential to advance the state-of-the-art to address the challenges and unmet clinical needs that are uniquely presented by the pediatric population, and it has become obvious that newly trained engineers are essential for success. These unmet clinical needs and the necessity of new technical skills and expertise give rise to the emergence of an entirely new field of engineering and applied science: Pediatric Engineering. The field of Pediatric Engineering flips conventional wisdom that adult therapies can simply be scaled or successfully modified for children. It commandeers design to suit the specific needs of the child, while anticipating the dynamic growth and development into adulthood. We are growing a new pipeline of educated scientists and engineers who will have developed a unique toolbox of skills that they can use to tackle unmet clinical needs in global pediatric healthcare for years to come.

Functional ectodermal organ regeneration as the next generation of organ replacement therapy.

In this decade, substantial progress in the fields of developmental biology and stem cell biology has ushered in a new era for three-dimensional organ regenerative therapy. The emergence of novel three-dimensional cell manipulation technologies enables the effective mimicking of embryonic organ germ formation using the fate-determined organ-inductive potential of epithelial and mesenchymal stem cells. This advance shows great potential for the regeneration of functional organs with substitution of complete original function in situ. Organoids generated from multipotent stem cells or tissue stem cells via establishment of an organ-forming field can only partially recover original organ function owing to the size limitation; they are considered 'mini-organs'. Nevertheless, they hold great promise to realize regenerative medicine. In particular, regeneration of a functional salivary gland and an integumentary organ system by orthotopic and heterotopic implantation of organoids clearly points to the future direction of organ regeneration research. In this review, we describe multiple strategies and recent progress in regenerating functional three-dimensional organs, focusing on ectodermal organs, and discuss their potential and future directions to achieve organ replacement therapy as a next-generation regenerative medicine.

Bionic Manufacturing: Towards Cyborg Cells and Sentient Microbots.

Bio-inspired engineering applies biological design principles towards developing engineering solutions but is not practical as a manufacturing paradigm. We advocate 'bionic manufacturing', a synergistic fusion of biotic and abiotic components, to transition away from bio-inspiration toward bio-augmentation to address current limitations in bio-inspired manufacturing.