Appropriate Scaffold Selection for Cns Tissue Engineering



Shafiee A^{1, 2} ; Ahmadi H³ ; Taheri B⁴ ; Hosseinzadeh S⁵ ; Fatahi Y² ; Soleimani M⁶ ; Atyabi F^{1, 2} ; Dinarvand R^{1, 2} Show Affiliations
Source: Avicenna Journal of Medical Biotechnology Published:2020

Abstract

Cellular transplantation, due to the low regenerative capacity of the Central Nervous System (CNS), is one of the promising strategies in the treatment of neurodegenera-tive diseases. The design and application of scaffolds mimicking the CNS extracellular matrix features (biochemical, bioelectrical, and biomechanical), which affect the cellular fate, are important to achieve proper efficiency in cell survival, proliferation, and differentiation as well as integration with the surrounding tissue. Different studies on natural materials demonstrated that hydrogels made from natural materials mimic the extracellular matrix and supply microenvironment for cell adhesion and prolifera-tion. The design and development of cellular microstructures suitable for neural tissue engineering purposes require a comprehensive knowledge of neuroscience, cell biolo-gy, nanotechnology, polymers, mechanobiology, and biochemistry. In this review, an attempt was made to investigate this multidisciplinary field and its multifactorial effects on the CNS microenvironment. Many strategies have been used to simulate ex-trinsic cues, which can improve cellular behavior toward neural lineage. In this study, parallel and align, soft and injectable, conductive, and bioprinting scaffolds were re-viewed which have indicated some successes in the field. Among different systems, three-Dimensional (3D) bioprinting is a powerful, highly modifiable, and highly pre-cise strategy, which has a high architectural similarity to tissue structure and is able to construct controllable tissue models. 3D bioprinting scaffolds induce cell attachment, proliferation, and differentiation and promote the diffusion of nutrients. This method provides exceptional versatility in cell positioning that is very suitable for the complex Extracellular Matrix (ECM) of the nervous system. © 2020, Avicenna Journal of Medical Biotechnology. All rights reserved.