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Liver diseases can be caused by viral infection, metabolic disorder, alcohol consumption, carcinoma or injury, chronically progressing to end-stage liver disease or rapidly resulting in acute liver failure. In either situation, liver transplantation is most often sought for life saving, which is, however, significantly limited by severe shortage of organ donors. Until now, tremendous multi-disciplinary efforts have been dedicated to liver regenerative medicine, aiming at providing transplantable cells, microtissues, or bioengineered whole liver via tissue engineering, or maintaining partial liver functions via extracorporeal support. In both directions, new compatible biomaterials, stem cell sources, and bioengineering approaches have fast-forwarded liver regenerative medicine towards potential clinical applications. Another important progress in this field is the development of liver-on-a-chip technologies, which enable tissue engineering, disease modeling, and drug testing under biomimetic extracellular conditions. In this review, we aim to highlight the last decade's progress in liver regenerative medicine from liver tissue engineering, bioartificial liver devices (BAL), to liver-on-a-chip platforms, and then to present challenges ahead for further advancement., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In recent years, nanotechnology has attracted much attention in the field of biomedicine and sensing technology. As one of the simplest and most effective methods to prepare nanofiber materials, electrospinning technology has a lot of application research in biomedical fields such as sensor detection, drug delivery, and tissue engineering because of its high porosity, large surface area to volume ratio, and uniform size. In this review, we summarized the latest application progress of electrospinning materials in biomedicine, sensing, and textile industry and discussed the challenges and future development direction of electrospinning technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]