Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Heart valve tissue engineering is aimed to construct heart valve grafts with the physiological function and biological activity by using engineering and life science principles and methods, but still in the animal experiment stage.
OBJECTIVE: To summarize the commonly used tissue engineered heart valve, and to evaluate the reliability of different types of heart valve biomaterials.
METHODS: Using “biological materials, heart valve, scaffolds, reviews, tissue engineering” in Chinese as the key words, a computer retrieval was performed for articles published from January 2000 to December 2010. Articles regarding the biomaterials in tissue engineered heart valve were included; the duplicated research or meta-analysis were excluded.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: A total of 20 papers about the biomaterials and tissue engineering heart valve were screened out. Due to the superior biocompatibility and three-dimensional conformation, natural scaffold materials exhibit unparalleled bionic property compared with other materials. Synthetic biodegradable polymer materials with good mechanical properties and controllability has thus been highly favored by researchers, while the composite scaffold materials of natural materials and polymer materials provides a new strategy and direction for the investigations of tissue engineered heart valve, and has broad application prospects.