Chitosan vascular tissue

Chitosan scaffolds may find application in regeneration of skin tissue, liver tissue, bone and cartilage tissue, cardiac tissue, corneal tissue, and vascular tissue to mention a few [73]. A brief account of its application in various branches of tissue engineering is described in this section. 

Zhu C, Fan D, Duan Z et al (2009) Initial investigation of novel human-like collagen/ chitosan scaffold for vascular tissue engineering. J Biomed Mater Res 89A 829-840... 

Chitosan has also been investigated to regenerate other soft tissues such as ligament, tendon, nerve, and vascular tissue. To mimic the fibrous structure of native ligament and tendon, Funakoshi et al. [200] developed chitosan/hyaluronan... 

Kong, D., Yang, J. et al. (2012) Gradient nanofibrous chitosan/poly varepsilon-caprolactone scaffolds as extracellular microenvironments for vascular tissue engineering. Biomaterials, 33 (3), 762-770. 

Vrana NE, Liu Y, McGuinness GB, Cahill PA (2008) Characteization of poly(vinyl alcohol)/ chitosan hydrogels as vascular tissue engineering scaffolds. Macromol Symp 269 106-110... 

Aliphatic polyesters, copolyesters, and natural macromolecules (mainly collagen, elastin, fibrin, chitosan, and hyaluronic acid (HA)), as well as their blends, have also been used to prepare polymeric-based vascular grafts with tuned mechanical properties. Couet et al. reported a comprehensive overview of materials that have been explored as scaffolds for vascular tissue engineering [59]. The analysis of the mechanical behavior of non-PU-based vascular grafts is beyond the scope of this chapter. 

The nasal tissue is highly vascularized and provides efficient systemic absorption. Compared with oral or subcutaneous administration, nasal administration enhances bioavailability and improves safety and efficacy. Chitosan enhances the absorption of proteins and peptide drugs across nasal and intestinal epithelia. Gogev et al. demonstrated that the soluble formulation of glycol chitosan has potential usefulness as an intranasal adjuvant for recombinant viral vector vaccines in cattle [276]. 

Natural polymers such as collagen, elastin, and fibrin make up much of the body s native extracellular matrix (ECM), and they were explored as platforms for tissue engineered constructs [34,47 9]. Polysaccharides such as chitosan, starch, alginate, and dextran were also studied for these purposes. Simultaneously, silk fibroin was widely explored for vascular applications due to its higher mechanical properties in comparison to other natural polymers, such as fibrin [48]. The utilization of natural polymers to create tissue-engineered scaffolds has yielded promising results, both in vitro and in vivo, due in part to the enhanced bioactivity provided by materials normally found within the human body [50]. However, their mechanical response is usually below the required values therefore, synthetic polymers have been explored to achieve the desired properties. 

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