Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Electrospun Nanofibers for Regenerative Medicine
Wenying Liu, Stavros Thomopoulos, and Younan Xia
9.1
Introduction
Many of the tissues in the human body do not have the capacity to regenerate, so
damage to these tissues is irreversible [1]. In addition to the poor ability to heal,
injuries to tissues such as nerve, tendon, cartilage, and myocardium also result in
significant pain and disability. Even with surgical intervention, return of function
is often limited and the healing response is scar-mediated rather than regenerative
[2]. Patients suffering from organ trauma, disease, or congenital abnormality must
rely on organ transplantation to regain function. In spite of its enormous success
clinically, this approach is plagued by post-surgical immune reactions and a severe
limitation in the number of available donors, leaving thousands of patients on
waiting lists [3]. In the United States, 18 people die each day before a suitable organ
donor is found [4]. To address these and other issues related to tissue damage and
organ transplantation, regenerative medicine has emerged as an interdisciplinary
research field that incorporates biology, materials science, and engineering to
develop functional substitutes that are safe and readily available for patients with
damaged tissues or organs. In regenerative medicine, elements of scaffold design,
cellular control, and signaling are integrated to enhance healing or replace an
injured tissue or organ [5].
One of the major challenges in regenerative medicine is to design and fabricate
a suitable scaffold. In order to achieve the desirable functionality of the tissue
or organ to be replaced, the scaffold needs to be carefully engineered to elicit
specific responses from local cells and organ systems [6]. In one approach, a donor
organ is decellularized and the remaining extracellular matrix (ECM) is used as
a scaffold [7]. The scaffold is then seeded with patient-specific cells to create a
functional substitute for implantation. Although this new strategy can mitigate
the immune response commonly seen with the conventional transplantation
approaches by using patient-specific cells, the availability of organs that can be used
for decellularization remains a stringent limitation [1]. This limitation has inspired
biomedical engineers to construct tissues and organs in the laboratory using
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