Polymeric Biomaterials Views

• General Goods

We present many examples of surface engineered polymeric biomaterials with nanosize modified layers, controlled protein adsorption, and cellular interactions potentially applicable for tissue and/or blood contacting devices, scaffolds for cell culture and tissue engineering, biosensors, biological microchips as well as approaches to their preparation.

Polymeric biomaterials with controlled protein adsorption and cellular interactions are currently of extremely increasing interest, mainly because of their potential for applications in the regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Repairing or replacing of damaged tissues or organs requires biocompatible materials that emulate living tissues. A future challenge is to modify biomaterials used for this purpose in a way that they imitate in their composition and/or structure the native physiological conditions for the tissue specific cells. Surface engineering plays an important role in the development of such biomaterials. Enormous research activity is focused now on the delivering of new and improved biomimetic biomaterials.

Development of stimuli-responsive polymeric biomaterials is expected to enable feedback-controlled scaffold structures for tissue engineering. Having a built-in adaptation of physical properties, such as elasticity or permeability, for example, similar synthetic polymer architectures will come closer to dynamic nature of the living matter.

Polymeric biomaterials are one of the cornerstones of tissue engineering. A wide range of materials has been used. Approaches have shown increasing sophistication over recent years employing drug delivery functionality, micropatterning, microfluidics, and other technologies. Challenges such as producing three-dimensional matrixes and rendering them deliverable through minimally invasive techniques have been addressed. A major recent development is the design of biomaterials for tissue engineering matrices to achieve specific biologic effects on cells, and vice versa. Much remains to be achieved, particularly in integrating other new technologies into the field.