ABSTRACT
Tendons transmit forces from muscles to bones, enabling the directed motions of fingers, toes, arms and legs. Despite being relatively small in size, they are important to the human body. In chronic rupture or trauma, a piece of substitutive material is needed to reconstruct the tendon. Conventional materials include synthetic polymers, autografts, allografts or xenografts. Currently, the new approach is tendon tissue engineering, which uses a cell-hybridized biodegradable scaffold to regenerate a neo-tendon.
