Multifunctional smart hydrogels in cartilage tissue engineering

The repair of cartilage damage is challenging in orthopedics owing to its low repair capacity. Tissue engineering has become a promising strategy for repairing damaged cartilage. Injectable hydrogels have demonstrated great potential for use as three-dimensional cell culture scaffolds in cartilage tissue engineering. Hydrogel matrices comprise a wide range of natural and synthetic polymers held together by a variety of physical or chemical crosslinks. Advantages of hydrogel such as: mechanical stiffness, bioactivity, water content, elasticity, porosity and degradation, make it good candidate for cartilage tissue engineering. Stimuli responsive hydrogels (SRHs) are attractive bio-scaffolds for cartilage tissue engineering. Different smart materials play an important role on hydrogels properties. Several hydrophilic polymeric systems that respond to stimuli such as light, temperature, pH, ionic concentration as well as those that can undergo chemical reactions to form cross-linked matrices are currently under development. Injectable in situ cross linkable gels are highly desirable clinically as they can be introduced into a body via a minimally invasive manner using endoscopic or percutaneous procedures. Nanostructured SRHs with the most structural similarity to natural ECM and flexible design capability are appropriate selection for faster tissue repair and more controlled stimuli-response to environmental changes. The addition of meshes of nanofibers and nanoparticles embedded in their matrix, forms a composite that draws from the advantages of both components. Despite all their beneficial properties, there are still several challenges to overcome for clinical translation. This review covers some of nanostructured SRHs designs and different researches on stimuli-sensitive hydrogels, such as role of temperature, electric potential, pH and ionic strength stimulation on cartilage tissue engineering.

کلیدواژه ها:

Hydrogels ، Cartilage tissue engineering ، Smart materials