The Belgian Society for Tissue Engineering was founded in 2013, when the first BSTE meeting took place. Since then, seven Universities from Belgium (KU Leuven, UA, UGent, UCL, UHasselt, ULiège and VUB) have continued to join their forces in the field of tissue engineering and established annual BSTE meetings, leading to the official registration of BSTE as a NPO in 2018.
The ultimate goal of tissue engineering is to replace diseased or lost organs by engineered functional organs. The last decades, significant advances have been made to reach this goal. Even more, since a few years tissue engineering has become a promising tool as in vitro models for drug screening and in disease modelling.