Biomaterial scaffolds for tissue engineering

Reconstruction and regeneration of new tissues are challenges facing scientists, technologists and clinicians. This review describes strategies of selection and design of biomaterials having significant impact on various possible synthesis routes for scaffold fabrication. The criteria for three-dimensional (3D) scaffold architectures are explored in tandem with biomaterial properties such as porosity, interconnectivity and mechanical integrity. The cell-surface biointerface is outlined in terms of biomaterial composition, target tissues and biological evaluation with emphasis on bone tissue engineering. Comparative merits and demerits of conventional and rapid prototyping (RP) approaches of fabrication are discussed. The conventional methods are often simple to design, inexpensive and flexible to optimise or modulate physicochemical properties. Despite being expensive and suffering from certain drawbacks of choice of materials and capital costs many generic RP techniques are extremely attractive in their ability to mimic new tissue structures and possibility of incorporating pharmaceutical agents. The future directions include scaffold development using nanobiomaterial based biosystems /biointerfaces where cell biology including genetically modified tissue engineering approaches can play a cross-disciplinary role for the success of tissue augmentation.