Physiologically relevant human tissue models for infectious diseases

•Advances in tissue engineering can be used to generate new infection models.•New models of infection can overcome longstanding obstacles in infectious disease research.•Bioengineered models for infectious diseases can aid progress in therapeutic strategies and can reveal new pathogenic mechanisms and insights to organogenesis.•3D tissue models could allow cultivation of previously noncultivatable microbes. Limitations of animal infection models have engendered longstanding obstacles in basic science and translational research. Lack of suitable animal models, the need for better predictors of human immune responses and pathogens that grow poorly or not at all outside the human host impact our ability to study infectious agents that cause human disease, generation of essential tools for genetic manipulation of microbial pathogens and development of vaccines, therapeutics and host-targeted immunotherapies. The advent of conceptual and methodological advances in tissue engineering along with collaborative efforts between the bioengineering and infectious diseases scientific communities hold great promise to overcome these significant barriers.