Textile Scaffolds: A Review of Some Significant Breakthroughs in Tissue Engineering

The article reviews some significant attempts in textile scaffolds related to developments in tissue engineering. The benefits offered by micro fibrous scaffold architectures fabricated by textile manufacturing techniques have been explored. Established and novel fiber-processing techniques can be exploited in order to generate templates matching the demands of the target cell niche. The problems related to the development of biomaterial fibers (especially from nature-derived materials) ready for textile manufacturing are addressed. Attention is also paid on how biological cues may be incorporated into microfibrous scaffold architectures by hybrid manufacturing approaches (e.g. nanofiber or hydrogel functionalization). Textile technologies have recently attracted great attention as potential biofabrication tools for engineering tissue constructs. Using current textile technologies, fibrous structures can be designed and engineered to attain the required properties that are demanded by different tissue engineering applications. Tissue engineering often uses synthetic scaffolds to direct cell responses during engineered tissue development. Since cells reside within specific niches of the extracellular matrix, it is important to understand how the matrix guides cell response and then incorporate this knowledge into scaffold design. The goal of this review is to review elements of cell–matrix interactions that are critical to informing and evaluating cellular response on synthetic scaffolds. Therefore, this review examines fibrous proteins of the extracellular matrix and their effects on cell behavior, followed by a discussion of the cellular responses elicited by fiber diameter, alignment, and scaffold porosity of two dimensional (2D) and three dimensional (3D) synthetic scaffolds.