Editing Tissue engineering (section)

=== Beginning ===
Most early progress in tissue engineering research was done in the US. This is due to less strict regulations regarding stem cell research and more available funding than in other countries. This leads to the creation of academic startups many of them coming from [[Harvard University|Harvard]] or [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]]. Examples are BioHybrid Technologies whose founder, Bill Chick, went to [[Harvard Medical School]] and focused on the creation of artificial pancreas. Another example would be Organogenesis Inc. whose founder went to MIT and worked on skin engineering products. Other companies with links to the MIT are TEI Biosciences, Therics and Guilford Pharmaceuticals.<ref name=":2"/> The renewed interest in biotechnologies in the 1980s leads to many private investors investing in these new technologies even though the business models of these early startups were often not very clear and did not present a path to long term profitability.<ref name="Umemura2019">{{cite journal| vauthors = Umemura M |date=2019-04-03|title=Challenging the Problem of 'Fit': Advancing the Regenerative Medicine Industries in the United States, Britain and Japan |journal=Business History|volume=61|issue=3|pages=456–480 |doi=10.1080/00076791.2018.1476496|s2cid=158171857|issn=0007-6791}}</ref> Government sponsors were more restrained in their funding as tissue engineering was considered a high-risk investment.<ref name=":2"/>

In the UK the market got off to a slower start even though the regulations on [[stem cell]] research were not strict as well. This is mainly due to more investors being less willing to invest in these new technologies which were considered to be high-risk investments.<ref name="Umemura2019" /> Another problem faced by British companies was getting the [[National Health Service|NHS]] to pay for their products. This especially because the NHS runs a cost-effectiveness analysis on all supported products. Novel technologies often do not do well in this respect.<ref name="Umemura2019" />

In Japan, the regulatory situation was quite different. First cell cultivation was only allowed in a hospital setting and second academic scientists employed by state-owned universities were not allowed outside employment until 1998. Moreover, the Japanese authorities took longer to approve new drugs and treatments than there US and European counterparts.<ref name="Umemura2019" />

For these reasons in the early days of the Japanese market, the focus was mainly on getting products that were already approved elsewhere in Japan and selling them. Contrary to the US market the early actors in Japan were mainly big firms or sub-companies of such big firms, such as J-TEC, Menicon and Terumo, and not small startups.<ref name="Umemura2019" /> After regulatory changes in 2014, which allowed cell cultivation outside of a hospital setting, the speed of research in Japan increased and Japanese companies also started to develop their own products.<ref name="Umemura2019" />