School of Chemical Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT, UK.
Biotechnol Lett. 2010 Jun;32(6):733-42. doi: 10.1007/s10529-010-0221-0. Epub 2010 Feb 13.
There has been a consistent increase in the mean life expectancy of the population of the developed world over the past century. Healthy life expectancy, however, has not increased concurrently. As a result we are living a larger proportion of our lives in poor health and there is a growing demand for the replacement of diseased and damaged tissues. While traditionally tissue grafts have functioned well for this purpose, the demand for tissue grafts now exceeds the supply. For this reason, research in regenerative medicine is rapidly expanding to cope with this new demand. There is now a trend towards supplying cells with a material in order to expedite the tissue healing process. Hydrogel encapsulation provides cells with a three dimensional environment similar to that experienced in vivo and therefore may allow the maintenance of normal cellular function in order to produce tissues similar to those found in the body. In this review we discuss biopolymeric gels that have been used for the encapsulation of mammalian cells for tissue engineering applications as well as a brief overview of cell encapsulation for therapeutic protein production. This review focuses on agarose, alginate, collagen, fibrin, hyaluronic acid and gelatin since they are widely used for cell encapsulation. The literature on the regeneration of cartilage, bone, ligament, tendon, skin, blood vessels and neural tissues using these materials has been summarised.
在过去的一个世纪里，发达国家的人口平均预期寿命持续增长。然而，健康预期寿命并没有同步增长。因此，我们有更大比例的生命处于不健康状态，对替代患病和受损组织的需求也在不断增长。虽然传统的组织移植物在这方面表现良好，但对组织移植物的需求现在已经超过了供应。出于这个原因，再生医学的研究正在迅速扩大，以应对这一新需求。现在有一种趋势是为细胞提供一种材料，以加速组织愈合过程。水凝胶包封为细胞提供了类似于体内经历的三维环境，因此可以维持正常的细胞功能，从而产生类似于体内的组织。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了用于组织工程应用的哺乳动物细胞包封的生物聚合物凝胶，以及细胞包封用于治疗性蛋白质生产的简要概述。本综述重点介绍琼脂糖、藻酸盐、胶原、纤维蛋白、透明质酸和明胶，因为它们广泛用于细胞包封。总结了使用这些材料再生软骨、骨、韧带、肌腱、皮肤、血管和神经组织的文献。
