Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Tissue engineering of oral mucosa has been developed rapidly in the recent decades, looking forward to overcome increasing requirement of oral mucosa reconstruction and supply shortage.
OBJECTIVE: To review the critical process of origin and choice of seed cells, scaffold materials and their advantages or disadvantages, and related growth factors in tissue engineered oral mucosa construction.
METHODS: Databases of PubMed and Elsevier were retrieved by the first author to research the papers published 2000-01/2011-12 by using “tissue engineering of oral mucosa, seed cells, scaffold material, growth factor” as keywords.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Several familiar seed cells of oral mucosa tissue engineering have good proliferation or differentiation capacity. Adipose-derived stem cells, which have more advantages compared to other seed cells, can be a kind of ideal seed cells. Multifarious common scaffold materials have their own advantages and disadvantages, and various methods can be applied to improve their properties. Application of some critical cytokines in oral mucosa tissue engineering can promote angiogenesis of implants and accelerate wound healing. Tissue engineering of oral mucosa is a safe and effective repairing method which can solve immunologic rejection and disease transmission of allograft and insufficient supply of autologous oral mucosa graft, and needs to be further researched.