PGA FIBER FOR SOFT TISSUE ENGINEERING - Intelligent Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine - page 681

Chapter 34

PGA FIBER FOR SOFT TISSUE
ENGINEERING

Wei Liu and Yilin Cao
Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery,
Shanghai 9 th People's Hospital, Shanghai Tissue Engineering
Key Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School
of Medicine, 639 Zhi Zao Ju Road, Shanghai 200011, P.R. China
liuwei [e-mail]; [e-mail]

34.1 Introduction

Treatment of various soft-tissue injuries and defects remains a
major challenge in reconstructive surgery, partly because there are
limited sources available for autologous tissue grafts. Soft-tissue
injuries and defects, such as of skin, tendon, cartilage, or blood ves-
sels, are common diseases in clinics. Currently, most of the recon-
structive surgical procedures are involved in tissue transfer, which
usually leads to donor site morbidity and functional disability. In
contrast, the tissue engineering approach is able to generate a tis-
sue graft by using expanded cells derived from the biopsied tissue
and scaffoldmaterials andthus to avoiddonorsite morbidity.
In 1993, Dr. Langer and Dr. Vacanti proposed the basic principle
of tissue engineering, which employs degradable scaffold and seed
cells to develop living tissue either in vitro or in vivo . 1 One of the