Unleashing the potential of supercritical fluids for polymer processing in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine

摘要

One of the major scientific challenges that tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) facesto move from benchtop to bedside regards biomaterials development, despite the latest advances inpolymer processing technologies.A variety of scaffolds processing techniques have been developed and include solvent casting andparticles leaching, compression molding and particle leaching, thermally induced phase separation, rapidprototyping, among others. Supercritical fluids appear as an interesting alternative to the conventionalmethods for processing biopolymers as they do not require the use of large amounts of organic solventsand the processes can be conducted at mild temperatures. However, this processing technique has onlyrecently started to receive more attention from researchers. Different processing methods based on theuse of supercritical carbon dioxide have been proposed for the creation of novel architectures based onnatural and synthetic polymers and these will be unleashed in this paper.