8 - Tissue engineering using natural polymers

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter explains that although several important advances have been made through the years in the bone and cartilage substitution and regeneration field, most serious injuries are still unrecoverable. Tissue engineering has been emerging as one of the most promising techniques in orthopedic surgery and biomedical engineering, offering promising alternatives to current therapies. The chapter describes a range of processing methodologies and technologies that have been used to develop tissue-engineering scaffolds from natural origin polymers. Tissue-engineering scaffolds consisting of naturally derived macromolecules have the potential advantages of biocompatibility, cell-controlled degradability, and intrinsic cellular interaction. However, they may exhibit batch variations and, in many cases, possess a narrow and limited range of mechanical properties. The processing technologies presented can tailor, to a great extent, the final properties of natural-origin scaffolds. In the same way that no material alone will satisfy all design parameters in all applications within the tissue-engineering field, it is also true that a wide range of materials can be tailored for discrete applications, through the use of the most appropriate processing methodologies and processing parameters selected. Despite all the difficulties of working with natural-based materials, it was shown that by using different process routes, it is possible to obtain a range of microstructures and mechanical properties that can accomplish many of the requirements of three-dimensional (3D) scaffolds for different tissue engineering applications.