Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering

摘要

Tissue engineering has recently attracted a great deal of attention for its potential in repairing,reconstruction, regenerating or replacing tissue in damaged or diseased organs. A number of tissues and organs have already been investigated using this approach including skin, cartilage, liver, bone, tendon, intestine, pancreas and blood vessel etc. The first commercial application was a bioartificial skin product for burn treatment that was introduced in 1990. In 1994, the total revenues for tissue engineering, bioartificial organs and cell therapies were only about $1.3 million, however, the world market is expected to grow to more than $ 2.7 billion by the year 2000. In tissue engineering, new functional living tissue is fabricated using living cells which are usually associated in one way or another with a matrix or scaffold. The living cells implantation can be associated with the matrix in cell culture before implantation. Here biomaterials play a key role in most tissue engineering approaches to create new tissues or biological substitutes for functional replacement. They are used as supportive scaffolds for cells, as conduits for guiding tissue growth, as barriers between transplanted cells and host tissue. The biomaterials used can be degradable or nondegradable ones for tissue reconstruction or substitution. respectively(cf. Figure 1).