Current Approaches and Future Trends to Promote Tendon Repair

Tendons are composed by extracellular collagen fibres arranged in regular arrays and are responsible to transmit tensile forces from a muscle to a bone. Due to their poor healing ability, in some cases tendons injuries are debilitating impairments that affect life quality among adult population worldwide. In the last years, attending to the social and economic concern associated to the high prevalence of tendons injuries and the limited success of the available current treatments, several scaffolds have been developed. Some of these scaffolds are intended to be used as graft-augmentation devices and others to fully replace a damaged tendon. The synthetic ones present superior mechanical characteristics compared to biological scaffolds. However, attending to the specific tendons physiology, even the synthetic scaffolds still don´t present the ideal mechanical properties to accomplish a complete and long-term functional tissue repair. Therefore, to enhance tendogenesis when using a tendon engineering approach, several methodologies have been developed to associate with scaffolds, including surface modification and cell seeding.