About recent developments of synthetic polymers for a suitable cell adhesion/growth support in tissue engineering-based either augmentation cystoplasty or neobladder

Abstract

Among the regenerative medicine technologies, the tissue engineering has emerged, in recent years, as a prominent tool, particularly given the tremendous developments in the field of synthetic polymer-based scaffolds. Scaffold surface coatings with either extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins or integrin-binding bioactive peptide sequences, such as RDG, proved to be extremely useful to enhance cell adhesion and growth. Nevertheless, about it, excellent effects may be reached by electrospinning-obtained nanofiber-structured synthetic polymer scaffold – such as polyurethane or polyethylene-terephthalate electrospun nanofibers – without resorting to surface- coated adhesion proteins. As for bladder tissue engineering, properly cell-seeded synthetic biomaterial-based scaffolds allow today timely chances to obtain constructs provided with specific bladder native tissue-like both histological-immunohistochemical and functional-dynamic features. Recent bright advances in the tissue engineering research, particularly in the area of materials science – together with increasing availability of suitable bioreactors – and stem cell biology, make foreseeable, in the near future, further technological improvements that might widen the clinical applications of bladder tissue engineering up to whole bladder replacement in radical tumor surgery.