ABSTRACT
Regenerative medicine represents a global, groundbreaking, and interdisciplinary biotechnological effort with tremendous potential to promote and extend the quality of human life. From an economic point of view, regenerative medicine is positioned to play a major role in health care and therapeutics. This ϐield has made great strides in recent years and has ensured major contribution in upcoming therapy. The concept of regenerative medicine encompasses tissue engineering (TE) and stem cell therapy (SCT). TE is one of the major components, which, in turn, combines the ϐields of cell transplantation, materials science, and engineering to acquire medicinal tissues that could restore and maintain normal tissue/organ function, having endogenous regenerative capacity [1]. Similarly, stem cell research offers novel opportunities for developing new treatments for various devastating diseases for which there are few or no cures. Stem cells are basically undifferentiated cells in the human body that can
continue dividing forever and can change into other types of cells. As stem cells have the capacity to differentiate into various types of cells, including bone, muscle, cartilage, and other specialized types of cells, they have the potential to treat many diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer. Therefore, they act as an attractive tool in regenerative medicine due to their ability to be committed along several lineages either through chemical or physical stimulation. The combination of stem cells with TE principles enables the development of the stem cell-based therapeutic strategy to human diseases. This close interrelationship will play an important role in the development of regenerative medicine for health care and therapeutics. Signiϐicant attention has been given to the so-far-developed implants, cell therapies, and engineered tissues, which indicates that the current understanding of the superstructure and the microstructure of biomaterial (used in scaffold) is no longer efϐicient to create successful regenerative therapies. It has been widely speculated that adding nanotopographies to the surfaces of conventional biomaterials may promote the functions of various cell types. For these reasons, biomaterials can be tailored by selectively varying both chemical and physical factors in order to maximize favorable cellular interactions (i.e., increasing functions of tissueforming cells but decreasing immune cell and bacteria functions). In this light, nanotechnology plays a pivotal role in promoting speciϐic function associated with regenerative health care. At the nanometer scale, where many biological processes operate, nanotechnology can provide the tools to probe and even direct these biological processes. Numerous studies have reported that nanotechnology accelerates various regenerative therapies, such as those for the bone, vascular, heart, cartilage, bladder, and brain tissue. Various nanostructured polymers and metals (alloys) have been investigated for their biocompatibility properties. This chapter discusses these nanostructured polymers and metals and latest nanotechnology ϐindings in regenerative medicine as well as their relative levels of success.
