Bone Tissue Engineering

The requirement for new bone to replace or restore the function of damaged or lost bone is a major clinical and social need. Bone tissue engineering has been considered as the alternative strategy to produce artificial bone grafts. The strategy of the method is to combine progenitor or mature cells isolated from desired cell source with biodegradable scaffolds to produce 3-D viable artificial bone in the laboratory conditions. Incorporation of growth factors that are regulators of cellular activities in vivo into the construct would protect these fragile molecules from degradation while sustaining their local concentration over a given period of time at the target site. Therefore, activities have been concentrated on the development of multi functional tissue engineering scaffolds capable of delivering the required bioactive agents to initiate and control cellular activities. This article reviews the recent developments in the production of functional artificial bone constructs via tissue engineering technique. [Archives Medical Review Journal 2010; 19(4.000): 206-219]