Abstract
BACKGROUND: Human adipose tissue is a great source of translatable biomaterials owing to its ease of availability and simple processing. Reusing discardable adipose tissue for tissue regeneration helps in mimicking the exact native microenvironment of tissue. Over the past 10 years, extraction, processing, tuning and fabrication of adipose tissue have grabbed the attention owing to their native therapeutic and regenerative potential. The present work gives the overview of next generation biomaterials derived from human adipose tissue and their development with clinical relevance. METHODS: Around 300 articles have been reviewed to widen the knowledge on the isolation, characterization techniques and medical applications of human adipose tissue and its derivatives from bench to bedside. The prospective applications of adipose tissue derivatives like autologous fat graft, stromal vascular fraction, stem cells, preadipocyte, adipokines and extracellular matrix, their behavioural mechanism, rational property of providing native bioenvironment, circumventing their translational abilities, recent advances in featuring them clinically have been reviewed extensively to reveal the dormant side of human adipose tissue. RESULTS: Basic understanding about the molecular and structural aspect of human adipose tissue is necessary to employ it constructively. This review has nailed the productive usage of human adipose tissue, in a stepwise manner from exploring the methods of extracting derivatives, concerns during processing and its formulations to turning them into functional biomaterials. Their performance as functional biomaterials for skin regeneration, wound healing, soft tissue defects, stem cell and other regenerative therapies under in vitro and in vivo conditions emphasizes the translational efficiency of adipose tissue derivatives. CONCLUSION: In the recent years, research interest has inclination towards constructive tissue engineering and regenerative therapies. Unravelling the maximum utilization of human adipose tissue derivatives paves a way for improving existing tissue regeneration and cellular based therapies and other biomedical applications.