MECHANO-ACTIVE SCAFFOLDS - Intelligent Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine - page 537

Chapter 27

MECHANO-ACTIVE SCAFFOLDS

Sang-Heon Kim, a Youngmee Jung, a Young Ha Kim, b
and Soo Hyun Kim a*
a Biomaterials Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology,
P.O. Box 131, Cheongryang, Seoul, Korea
b Department of Materials Science & Engineering,
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology,
261 Cheomdan-gwagiro, Buk-gu, Gwangju, Korea
*[e-mail]

Biological processes are regulated through mechanical stim-
uli as well as biochemical interactions. The process by which
mechanical stimuli are sensed and transmitted to the nucleus
to induce changes in cell morphology and phenotype is also
not clearly understood. Nevertheless, tissue engineering research
takes mechanical stimuli into consideration, particularly in efforts
to engineer components of the cardiovascular system and artic-
ular cartilage. Strategies concerning the mechanical environment
of cells or tissues have been termed “mechano-active tissue engi-
neering.” Mechano-active scaffolds have employed elastic materi-
als in mechano-active vascular and cartilage tissue engineering.
Natural polymers and biodegradable polymers were studied
for design of mechano-active scaffolds. The poly-( L -lactide- co -
caprolactone) (PLCL) copolymer is composed of a soft matrix of
ε -caprolactone moieties and hard domains containing additional