Medicine tissue engineering

Porous silicon possesses a number of favorable properties that make it relevant to the field of regenerative medicine / tissue engineering (i.e. the idea that the human body can heal itself with the assistance of a temporary scaffold). These properties include tunable scaffold dissolution based on Si nanostructure thickness/porosity and surfaee ehemistry in vitro and in vivo compatibility and facile formation of easily processible porous silieon / bioeompatible polymer constructs. In this review, selected formulations of porous Si relevant to seaffold evaluation are described, followed by key tissue engineering milestones for porous silieon, and brief summaries of studies of porous silieon-containing materials with relevance to specific therapies. 

Richardson SM et al (2007) Intervertebral disc biology, degeneration and novel tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. Histol Histopathol 22(9) 1033-1041... 

Now with tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and combination products, active materials are the topic of interest of biomaterials specialists. 

Artificial materials are of growing importance in the fields of medicine and biology. Tissue Engineering, a new and modem interdiseiplinary seientific field, has been developed to design biocompatible materials in order to substitute irreversibly damaged tissues and organs. 

The ex vivo expansion of hematopoietic cells is a rapidly growing area of tissue engineering with many potential applications in medicine. During the last few years a variety of bioreactor concepts and cultivation strategies have been developed, but no final decision has been made about the optimal system for hematopoietic culture. 

Wintermantel E., Bruinick A., Eckert C.L., et al., Tissue engineering supported with structured biocompatible materials goals and achievements in Speidel M.O., Uggowitzer P.J. (eds) Materials in Medicine, VDF Hochschulvelag AG an der ETH, Zurich, 1998,1-136. 

The important theme in all of these definitions is the desire of the drafters to move away from the use of donor or artificial organs or tissues as replacement for damaged body parts and explore mechanisms hy which the body can he encouraged to heal itself. This theme is reflected in two terms sometimes used as synonyms for tissue engineering regenerative medicine and reparative biology. 

BC is a good material not only for wound treatment and other fields of veterinary medicine, but also as a scaffold material for cell cultivation in tissue engineering [156,157]. On such scaffolds the fzmb has cultivated the following cell types successfully human osteoblasts, human osteogenic sarcoma cells (SAOS-2), equine osteoblast lines and chondrocytes, and mesenchymal stem cells. 

It could be demonstrated that BC is biocompatible and a stable basis for further research in tissue engineering and also the development of new technological variants for veterinary medicine. 

In practice, further important aspects of BC are the focus of interest, concerning cooling of overtaxed muscles and particularly wound treatment of animals such as horses, sheep, cows, cats, and dogs. Extremely highly infected wounds are frequent in dogs after car crashes or similar accidents [143]. Furthermore, treatment of badly healing and permanent wounds, e.g., ulcers, and in the clinical and home-care sector both for human and veterinary medicine, as well as specific applications in tissue engineering will be major future developments. 

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