Biomaterials for Bone Tissue Engineering: Recent Advances and Challenges

Abstract

Millions of people are suffering today due to bone disease caused by bone injury and trauma. Bone tissue engineering is the interdisciplinary research field of biomaterial and tissue engineering to address these problems for the improvement of better quality of life. Due to several complexity in conventional approach like limited supply of autograft and donor side morbidity in case of allograft, researcher opted for tissue engineering scaffold to counter these problems. Tissue engineering scaffold is design to grow and proliferate bone cell in a three dimensional platform which mimics the extra cellular matrix of bone. Scaffold seeded with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is considered to be a very useful technique in the field of biomedical engineering. The main objective of this chapter is to provide an overall work done so far in this field, with a special focus on the evolution of biomaterials and their characteristics that are specific for biopolymer scaffold based strategies of bone and cartilage tissue engineering.