Fibrous Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering
A special issue of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2011) | Viewed by 20574
Special Issue Editor
Interests: tissue engineering; production and processing of polymer scaffolds; polymer surface modification
Special Issue Information
We are sorry to announce that Dr. Heike Hall (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) passed away on 22 July 2011 after a long fight with disease. In addition to being the initial Guest Editor for this special issue, she was a key Editorial Board member of the journal Materials and will be greatly missed.
Dear Collegues,
Scaffolds for tissue engineering need to fulfil many requirements. Inspired by the architecture of native extracellular matrix, fibrous scaffolds are regarded to be a promising solution for engineered tissue-substitutes as they provide some key features, being the fiber structure itself presenting a large surface area for cell attachment, comparatively high interfiber distances allowing cell infiltration, nutrition and gas exchange and structural support that can be adjusted according to the needs of the tissue to be replaced.
In this special issue different ways of production of fibrous scaffolds for tissue engineering will be introduced and their advantaged discussed. The main focus will be on electrospun scaffolds as this technique allows producing controlled fibers assembling to fiber fleeces containing randomly oriented or aligned fibers. The materials that can be used vary from native macromolecules to purely synthetic polymers, even metals and ceramics have been described. Electrospinning allows large production of fibrous scaffold and might therefore be a very elegant, cost-efficient and versatile technique to be applied for production of scaffolds in tissue engineering.
Several applications for fibrous scaffolds in hollow organ tissue engineering such as cardiovascular devices, bladder and trachea will be discussed.
Heike Hall
Guest Editor
Keywords
- tissue engineering
- fibrous scaffolds
- electrospinning
- porosity
- drug delivery
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