Descriptions of urological catheters exist from the Romans. Sculls also dating back to ancient times with gold inlays in teeth were found in Ecuador. In Egypt linen soaked with rubber were used for wound closure. Upper aerodigestive tract, multifunctional polymer implant materials, pharynx reconstruction, tracheal reconstruction, tissue engineering, gastric wall regenerationīody foreign materials were used for medical purposes already in the ancient times. In future the advanced stem cell technology will allow further progress in the reconstruction of different kind of tissues also in the field of head and neck surgery following the principles of Tissue Engineering. In none of the animals tested either gastrointestinal complications or negative systemic events occurred, however, there was a multilayered regeneration of the gastric wall implying a regular structured mucosa. In order to test this material for applications in the ADT under extreme chemical, enzymatical, bacterial and mechanical conditions we applied it for the reconstruction of a complete defect of the gastric wall in an animal model. A new polymeric implant material consisting of multiblock copolymers was applied in our own work which was regarded as a promising material for the reconstruction of the upper aerodigestive tract (ADT) due to its physicochemical characteristics. In pharyngeal reconstruction far reaching developments cannot be recognized at the moment which would allow to give a prognosis of their success in clinical application. The advances in Tissue Engineering (TE) offer new therapeutical options also in the field of the reconstructive surgery of the trachea. Essential problems are insufficiencies of anastomoses, stenoses, lack of mucociliary clearance and vascularisation. Inspite of a multitude of options and the availability of very different materials none of these methods applied for tracheal reconstruction were successfully introduced into the clinical routine. Through evaluations of posttransplantation histology and endoscopy, we confirmed that our partial decellularization method could be a potential method of producing low-immunogenic cartilage scaffolds with viable, functional core cartilage cells that can achieve long-term survival after in vivo transplantation.The existing therapeutical options for the tracheal and pharyngeal reconstruction by use of implant materials are described. Finally, orthotopic transplantation of partially decellularized trachea with no immunosuppression treatment resulted in 2 months of survival in two rabbits and one long-term survival (2 years) in one rabbit. The ability of the decellularized tracheal segments to evade immune rejection was evaluated through heterotopic implantation of the segments into the chest muscle of rabbits without any immunosuppressive therapy, which demonstrated no evidence of severe rejection or tissue necrosis under H&E staining, as well as the mechanical stability under stress-pressure testing. The post-decellularized tracheal segments were assessed with vital staining, which showed that the core cartilage cells remarkably remained intact while the cells outside of the cartilage were no longer viable. Partial decellularization was performed using a combination of detergent and sonication to completely remove the epithelial layers outside of the cartilage ring. In this study, we developed a new procedure for the rapid partial decellularization of the harvested trachea.

Protein scaffold trachea