5 - Hyaluronic acid-based hydrogel for tissue engineering

Abstract

The past 30years have seen increasingly rapid advances in the field of tissue engineering. The advancement in the field of tissue engineering could address the drawback involved in the artificial organs and organ transplantation, as well as in the replacement of lost or severely damaged tissues. The major challenges faced in tissue engineering include vascularization, tissue architecture, and cell seeding. Hence, to address the challenges, biologically active scaffolds with ideal characteristics should be properly designed. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the use of hydrogel as biologically active scaffolds in tissue engineering. Recently, hyaluronic acid (HA) has been widely used as biomaterials for scaffold fabrication owing to their biofunctionality and multiple reactive functional groups. Pure HA has shown limitation in the gel properties; hence, structural modification on HA has been emphasized through various crosslinking reactions to afford hydrogel with optimum properties suitable for tissue engineering application. The biomaterials developed should be affordable for clinical use and must also satisfy marketing and regulatory requirements. Many HA-derived hydrogels have been reported to meet these criteria, thus widely used in tissue engineering. Hence, this chapter discusses the basic concepts and recent advances of HA-based hydrogels developed for tissue engineering application.