By most standard engineering practice principles, it is premature to credibly discuss the "engineering" of a human cornea. A professional design engineer would assert that we still do not know what a cornea is (and correctly so), therefore we cannot possibly build one. The proof resides in the fact that there are no clinically viable corneas based on classical tissue engineering methods available. This is possibly because tissue engineering in the classical sense (seeding a degradable scaffolding with a population synthetically active cells) does not produce conditions which support the generation of organized tissue. Alternative approaches to the problem are in their infancy and include the methods which attempt to recapitulate development or to produce corneal stromal analogs de novo which require minimal remodeling. Nonetheless, tissue engineering efforts, which have been focused on producing the fundamental functional component of a cornea (organized alternating arrays of collagen or "lamellae"), may have already provided valuable new insights and tools relevant to development, growth, remodeling and pathologies associated with connective tissue in general. This is because engineers ask a fundamentally different question (How can that be done?) than do biological scientists (How is that done?). The difference in inquiry has prompted us to closely examine (and to mimic) development as well as investigate collagen physicochemical behavior so that we may exert control over organization both in cell culture (in vitro) and on the benchtop (de novo). Our initial results indicate that reproducing corneal stroma-like local and long-range organization of collagen may be simpler than we anticipated while controlling spacing and fibril morphology remains difficult, but perhaps not impossible in the (reasonably) near term.

中文翻译：

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角膜组织工程的前奏——获得对胶原组织的控制。

根据大多数标准工程实践原则，现在就可信地讨论人类角膜的“工程”还为时过早。专业的设计工程师会断言我们仍然不知道角膜是什么（而且是正确的），因此我们不可能建造一个。证据在于没有基于可用的经典组织工程方法的临床上可行的角膜。这可能是因为传统意义上的组织工程（用具有合成活性的细胞群接种可降解支架）不会产生支持有组织组织生成的条件。解决该问题的替代方法还处于起步阶段，包括尝试重现发育或从头生产角膜基质类似物的方法，这些方法需要最少的重塑。尽管如此，组织工程的努力一直专注于产生角膜的基本功能成分（有组织的交替排列的胶原蛋白或“薄片”），可能已经提供了与发育、生长、重塑和与结缔组织相关的病理学相关的有价值的新见解和工具。组织一般。这是因为工程师提出的问题（怎么做？）与生物科学家（怎么做？）完全不同。探究的差异促使我们仔细检查（和模拟）发育以及研究胶原蛋白的理化行为，以便我们可以在细胞培养（体外）和台式（从头）上控制组织。