Dw. Hutmacher, Scaffold design and fabrication technologies for engineering tissues - state of the art and future perspectives, J BIOM SC P, 12(1), 2001, pp. 107-124
Today, tissue engineers are attempting to engineer virtually every human ti
ssue. Potential tissue-engineered products include cartilage, bone. heart v
alves, nerves. muscle, bladder, liver, etc. Tissue engineering techniques g
enerally require the use of a porous scaffold, which serves as a three-dime
nsional template for initial cell attachment and subsequent tissue formatio
n both in vitro and in vivo. The scaffold provides the necessary support fo
r cells to attach, proliferate, and maintain their differentiated function.
Its architecture defines the ultimate shape of the new grown soft or hard
tissue. In the early days of tissue engineering, clinically established mat
erials such as collagen and polyglycolide were primarily considered as the
material of choice for scaffolds. The challenge for more advanced scaffold
systems is to arrange cells/tissue in an appropriate 3D configuration and p
resent molecular signals in an appropriate spatial and temporal fashion so
that the individual cells will grow and form the desired tissue structures
- and do so in a way that can be carried out reproducibly, economically, an
d on a large scale. This paper is not intended to provide a general review
of tissue engineering, but specifically concentrate on the design and proce
ssing of synthetic polymeric scaffolds. The material properties and design
requirements are discussed. An overview of the various fabrication techniqu
es of scaffolds is presented, beginning with the basic and conventional tec
hniques to the more recent, novel methods that combine both scaffold design
and fabrication capabilities.