Regardless of the strategy used to stimulate angiogenesis, sufficient
and functional endothelial cells (EC) are as much required as the
abundance of angiogenic growth factors. Several groups are therefore
exploring the addition of autologous EC to tissue engineering implants
in order to accelerate the establishment of a functional vascular network.
Mature EC can be used for these vascularization strategies, although
several drawbacks are linked to the use of this cell population. First,
the low availability and proliferation capacity limit the upscaling of
the constructs for clinical applications [87]. Second, EC derived from
different tissues are phenotypically different [88–90]. In contrast,
endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) might be a more interesting source