The Pros And Cons Of Tissue Engineering

Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are an interdisciplinary field that aims to maintain, repair or improve tissue functions that are defective or lost by Disease, injury and trauma, either by developing biological substitutes or by reconstructing tissues.

Tissue autografting and allografting are commonly approaches that have used for replacing damaged or diseased tissue. Nevertheless, these approaches have faced with several drawbacks.

Tissue engineering involves three key factors: scaffold, signaling molecules and cell culture. The development of scaffolds are the main areas of biomaterials research, and they play a pivotal role in tissue regeneration and repair.

Regardless of the type of tissue, ideal scaffolds must have crucial

It is rare that a biomaterial possess all ideal properties for scaffold fabrication. Synthetic and natural materials are used in the fabrication of scaffolds for tissue engineering and each of these material groups possesses specific advantages and disadvantages. Synthetic materials can be fabricated with a tailored architecture for specific applications, so they exhibit have pivotal properties (e.g., predictable and reproducible mechanical and physical properties such as tensile strength, elastic modulus, and degradation rate) in tissue engineering, but they have drawbacks including the poor biologically activity and cell attachment as well as they are lack cell recognition sites. Unlike synthetic materials, natural materials are biologically active and typically induce excellent cell attachment, migration and proliferation. Furthermore, they are biodegradable by an enzymatic or hydrolytic mechanism and so allow host cells, over time, to eventually secrete their own extracellular matrix and replace the degraded scaffold. However, the development of scaffolds from biological materials with predictable and reproducible structure presents a challenge as well as the biological scaffolds suffer from poor mechanical properties, which limits their

Fibronectin is a high molecular weight glycoprotein with a molecular mass of 440 KDa that involves of three types of repeating amino acid units, named type I, type II, and type III repeats (fig 1). FN is produced as a dimer joined by two disulfide bonds. There are two kinds of FN, including Plasma FN (pFn) is secreted by hepatocytes and Cellular FN (cFn) is produced by fibroblasts, epithelial cells and other differentiated cell types. Fn has multiple binding domains to interact with ECM proteins, cell surface integrins, and growth