Hydrogels forMusculoskeletal Tissue Engineering - Advances in Polymer Science - page 95

Hydrogels for Musculoskeletal Tissue Engineering

Shyni Varghese ( ) · Jennifer H. Elisseeff

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University,
3400 N Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
[e-mail], [e-mail]

1 I tr cti n ................................... 96

2 General Concepts in Tissue Engineering ................... 99

2.1 BiomaterialsforGuidedTissueRepair..................... 100

2.2 CellTherapies .................................. 101

2.3 BioscaffoldsandCells.............................. 102

3 Scaffolds in Tissue Engineering ........................ 103

4 y r gel Scaff l s ............................... 106

4.1 NaturalHydrogels................................ 108

4.2 SyntheticHydrogels............................... 116

5 Biodegradable Hydrogels ............................ 119

5.1 HydrolyticallyDegradableHydrogels ..................... 120

5.2 EnzymaticallyDegradableHydrogels ..................... 120

6 Minimally Invasive Strategies ......................... 121

6.1 Photopolymerization .............................. 121

6.2 SmartHydrogels................................. 123

6.3 Self-AssemblingProteins ............................ 125

6.4 ShapeMemoryPolymers ............................ 126

6.5 MultifunctionalPolymers............................ 129

7 Hydrogels for Stem Cell Differentiation .................... 129

8 Chemical Integration of Engineered Tissue with Native Tissues ...... 132

9 cl i g e ar s .............................. 134

References ....................................... 135

Abstract The advancements in scaffold-supported cell therapy for musculoskeletal tissue
engineering have been truly dramatic in the last couple of decades. This article briefly re-
views the role of natural and synthetic hydrogels in the above field. The most appealing
feature of hydrogels as scaffolding materials is their structural similarity to extracel-
lular matrix (ECM) and their easy processability under mild conditions. The primary
developments in this field comprise formulation of biomimetic hydrogels incorporating
specific biochemical and biophysical cues so as to mimic the natural ECM, design strate-
gies for cell-mediated degradation of scaffolds, techniques for achieving in situ gelation
which allow minimally invasive administration of cell-laden hydrogels into the defect