Tissue-Engineered Approach to Bone Injuries

Over the past decades, great progress has been accomplished towards repairing and regenerating injured or diseased bone. Tissue-engineered scaffolding approaches have currently been acknowledged as efficient 3D biomimetic bone models, with better integration and degradation in vivo over conventional bone grafts/therapies. Those structures can be engineered with gradients of bioactive molecules and/or cells to replicate structural, mechanical, and biological microenvironments, to ensure a functional bone tissue development, and become a prevalent clinical reality. A comprehensive overview of recent strategies in scaffold-based bone tissue engineering with potential clinical application is presented herein. Attention has been directed towards to structural issues, as porosity and pore size, and surface topography, mechanical properties, vascularization potential, immunomodulation, and external stimulation strategies as electrical and magnetic.