ABSTRACT
Regenerative medicine is concerned with aiding the body’s natural healing process. Tissue engineering is a branch of regenerative medicine in which cell biology is combined with engineering principles to replicate the tissue in vitro. Tissue engineering is therefore used to develop tissue constructs within the body to aid healing, or to model the tissue to gain a better understanding of its function. There is a vast range of materials used in tissue engineering but the most widely used are natural and synthetic polymers. Synthetic polymers have the advantage that their properties can be tailored from the molecular structure to the scaffold architecture, which makes them highly versatile. This chapter will give an overview of the synthetic polymers currently used in tissue engineering and will focus on polyesters, specically alpha-hydroxy acids, which are the most common and widely used since their introduction into the medical eld as sutures in 1960s and xators [1]. The chapter will describe the polymerization of polyesters by ring opening polymerization (ROP), different scaffold fabrication techniques, surface modication of polyester scaffolds to improve cell culture properties, and nally selecting a suitable bioreactor for a given scaffold. Examples are drawn from all types of tissue engineering, the majority from bone tissue engineering. The reader is also directed to a number of recent reviews that may be of interest on biomaterials for tissue engineering [2-6], surface modication [7], and bioreactor design [8-11] as well as references throughout the chapter.
