Abstract:

BACKGROUND: The key link of bone tissue engineering is scaffold materials, which is essential for cells transplantation and bone growth, so as to act as the substitute of bone excellular matrix.
OBJECTIVE: To summarize the development of scaffold materials of bone tissue engineering and to prospect the trend.
METHODS: The relative literatures addressing synthetic or natural scaffold materials published between 1995-01-12 and 2011-01 in PubMed database, Wanfang database, CNKI and VIP database were searched by the first author. The search terms were “bone tissue engineering, scaffold material, extracellular matrix, DBM, chitosan, HA, β-TCP” in English and Chinese. The repeated studies were removed according to inclusive criteria, and finally 30 articles were included.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Scaffold material is the key point of tissue engineering bone which exerts the function as the extracellular matrix, such as providing a proper microenvironment for restoration of tissues and cells, withstanding pressure from surrounding tissues, and temporarily resuming partial function of stress-bearing site, and so on. Currently, synthetic materials and natural materials have their own advantages and disadvantages. Flows of synthetic materials are low cell adhesion rate, only partial degradation, unclear teratogenicity and carcinogenicity; while, antigenicity of natural materials should be lower, and the relationship between mechanical property and control of degradation speed should be more coordinated. Sufficient knowledge about the characteristics of the materials will provide theoretical foundation for searching new methods and new materials.