Tissue repair, guided

The following discussion is useful in designing a template for tissue repair and regeneration applications. By way of an example, the design parameters listed below are specifically applied to the development of a resorbable collagen based template for guiding meniscal tissue repair and regeneration in the knee joint. 

Nerve grafts or conduits guide the repair of injured neural tissue. Neural repair in the central nervous system, as in the case of spinal injury, as well as peripheral nerve damage associated with trauma, often result in uncontrolled growth of neural tissue. The result is that no effective conduction path is obtained and both movement and sensory response can be lost in the body portion distal to the injury. 

P3HB patches have shown potential for guided tissue regeneration in a number of animal studies and in patients. Nonwoven P3HB patches made from solution-spun fibers have been extensively studied for defect repair in heart surgery, such as for pericardial substitution [32,33,142,143,204,211-213], for closure of atrial septal defects [144], and for enlargement of the right ventricular outflow tract and the pulmonary artery [145]. 

In biomedical applications, transglutaminases have been used for tissue engineering materials such as enzymatically crosslinked collagen [60-63] or gelatin scaffolds [64-69]. Even melt-extruded guides based on enzymatically crosslinked macromolecules for peripheral nerve repair have been reported [70]. 

Fig. 1 Cellular (top left) and acellular (bottom left) tissue engineering approaches. Matrix materials are implanted into patient and act as an artificial ECM for cells to infiltrate, adhere, proliferate, and differentiate, and finally to guide repair and regeneration (modified from [5])...

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