Surface-Engineered Magnetic Nanoparticles in Skeletal Muscle Tissue Engineering: From Biological Interactions to...

The repair and functional restoration of skeletal muscle tissue following trauma, degenerative disease, or volumetric muscle loss remains a significant unmet clinical challenge in tissue engineering, where the need to recapitulate the anisotropic architecture, mechanical compliance, and high metabolic demands of native muscle imposes stringent requirements on biomaterial design. Traditional cell culturing and scaffold fabrication strategies have proven insufficient to address these demands in isolation, particularly in integrating mechanical integrity, biochemical functionality, and biological activity within a single biomaterial system. Recent advances in material science have accelerated the evolution of skeletal muscle tissue engineering toward a more precise and technologically sophisticated discipline. In this context, surface-engineered magnetic nanoparticle (MNP) hybrids have emerged as a promising multifunctional platform, owing to their intrinsic biocompatibility, tunable physicochemical properties, and rapid, non-invasive responsiveness to external magnetic fields. These unique characteristics have enabled the development of magnetic force-based tissue engineering strategies, facilitating controlled myogenic cell organization, magnetically guided delivery of therapeutic agents and stem cells, enhanced muscle construct formation within responsive scaffolds, and real-time non-invasive monitoring of engineered systems via MRI. This review systematically synthesizes the recent advances in surface-engineered MNP platforms for skeletal muscle tissue engineering, covering organic and inorganic coating strategies, magnetically responsive scaffold integration, guided cell and drug delivery, and construct monitoring, whilst critically appraising the biocompatibility, biodistribution, and regulatory challenges that currently define the translational pathway for MNP-augmented skeletal muscle constructs.