Freeze-Derived Microporous Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering Applications

Tissue engineering holds immense promise to revolutionize regenerative medicine by enabling the fabrication of functional, patient-specific tissues and organs for clinical translation, yet it continues to face persistent challenges in designing scaffolds that simultaneously recapitulate native tissue architecture, support cell viability, and enable efficient mass transport. Traditional fabrication has moved the field forward, yet routinely falls short of producing hierarchical, anisotropic, biomimetic structures under gentle conditions. Ice-templating (or freeze-casting), which is based on freeze-induced microphase separation, reframes the problem as crystal-growth engineering. This review summarizes current fabrication strategies and their underlying mechanism of ice-templating technology from physical and chemical perspectives. We then highlight recent advances in ice-templating for tissue engineering application fields such as 3D cell culture, wound healing, bone regeneration, nerve repair, and liver support, emphasizing the relationship between microstructure and biomedical functional performance. Finally, we discuss the key challenges in translating ice-templated biomaterials from laboratory research to clinical practice and outline future directions to fully harness this versatile biomedical strategy.