Fabrication of biodegradable polymer foams for cell transplantation and tissue engineering.

Organ transplantation has been successful since the early 1960s as a result of the success in immunologic suppression in the clinical setting (1), and has saved, and is continuing to save, countless lives, but is far from a perfect solution to tissue losses or organ failures. By far the most serious problem facing transplantation is donor scarcity. Approximately 30,000 Americans need liver transplantation each year, but only about 10% of the patients have the chance to receive a donated liver transplant (2). There is a total of approx 100,000 people in the United States with transplants, but there are more than 1 million with biomedical implants (3). Tissue engineering and cell transplantation are fields emerging to resolve the missing tissue and organ problems.