An Introduction to Tissue Engineering and the Most Widely Used Scaffolds

Abstract

Background: In today’s world, humankind is exposed upon a wide spectrum of diseases and tissue damages, which some of them are untreatable with current medical approaches. The untreated damaged tissues encompasses a widespread of destroyed parts with loss function in which natural repair mechanisms are not able to reconstruct them. Therefore, remedy for these lesions is related to a branch of medical sciences called regenerative medicine. One of the tools in regenerative medicine is transplantation of tissue-like structures via tissue engineering. We searched several databases such as PubMed, Scientific Information Database (SID), Springer, Medline, Magiran, ScienceDirect, and Sivilica, and used Google Scholar search engine to find the articles in this issue. Different researches and clinical results show that with the help of tissue engineering, structures similar to natural tissues for repair can be designed. These structures are made up of three parts of scaffold, cell, and growth factors. In the construction of these structures, the design of ideal scaffold with the desired properties and mechanical strength is important, depending on the type of material and method of its construction. Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering are successful and necessary in repairing or replacing damaged tissues.

Keywords

• Regenerative medicine
• Tissue engineering
• Tissue scaffolding