Tissue engineering and rotator cuff tendon healing.

Rotator cuff tears are common soft-tissue injuries that often require surgical treatment. Initial efforts to better tendon healing centered on improving the strength of the repair. More recent studies have focused on biologic enhancement of the healing process. Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary field that involves the application of scientific principles toward creating living tissue to replace, repair, or augment diseased tissue. Gene therapy involves the transfer of a certain gene into a cell so that the cell translates the gene into a specific protein. The advantage of using a gene-therapy, tissue-engineered approach to effect healing rests in the ability of the physician to select growth factors with documented roles in the tendon-healing cascade. Ideally, an improvement to the current repair technique would yield improved tendon healing leading to improved clinical results.