Synthetic polymer scaffolds for soft tissue engineering.

摘要

Tissue engineering (TE) and regenerative medicine areprogressively developed areas due to many novel tissuereplacements and implementation strategies. Increasingknowledge involving the fabrication of biomaterials withadvanced physicochemical and biological characteristics,successful isolation and preparation of stem cells, incorporationof growth and differentiation factors, and biomimeticenvironments gives us a unique opportunity to develop varioustypes of scaffolds for TE. The current strategies for soft tissuereconstitution or regeneration highlight the importance of novelregenerative therapies in cases of significant soft tissue loss andin cases of congenital defects, disease, trauma and ageing.Various types of biomaterials and scaffolds have been tested forsoft tissue regeneration. The synthetic types of materials havegained great attention due to high versatility, tunability and easyfunctionalization for better biocompatibility. This article reviewsthe current materials that are usually the most used for thefabrication of scaffolds for soft TE; in addition, the types ofscaffolds together with examples of their applications for theregenerative purposes of soft tissue, as well as their majorphysicochemical characteristics regarding the increasedapplicability of these materials in medicine, are reviewed.