review · Bioengineering
Biopolymers offer diverse chemical, mechanical, and physical properties that make them central to the fabrication of three-dimensional scaffolds for bone tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Both synthetic and natural polymeric materials provide structural frameworks that incorporate biological macromolecules tailored for bone repair. Manufacturing techniques span conventional methods, such as freeze-drying, electrospinning, gas foaming, thermally induced phase separation, sol-gel processes, and solvent casting combined with particle leaching. Advanced additive manufacturing approaches, including stereolithography, fused deposition modelling, selective laser sintering, and three-dimensional bioprinting, offer distinct features compared to subtractive manufacturing. Polymeric scaffolds also play critical immunomodulatory roles during bone healing. However, translating these scaffold-based therapies into clinical practice involves significant technical and biological challenges.
Bone damage from trauma, disease, or ageing often requires advanced regenerative therapies to restore skeletal function. Three-dimensional polymeric scaffolds provide artificial structures that guide new bone growth while interacting favourably with the immune system. Understanding fabrication methods and biological interactions helps researchers address the practical hurdles that prevent laboratory tissue engineering discoveries from successfully treating patients.
The work relates to bone tissue engineering therapies and advanced biomaterial manufacturing, targeting biomedical device developers, orthopaedic clinicians, and tissue engineers. As a broad overview detailing manufacturing techniques from electrospinning to additive bioprinting alongside practical translation hurdles, it indicates an early- to intermediate-stage research landscape where manufacturing standards and implementation challenges must be resolved before widespread routine clinical use.
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Over the last few years, biopolymers have attracted great interest in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine due to the great diversity of their chemical, mechanical, and physical properties for the fabrication of 3D scaffolds. This review is devoted to recent advances in synthetic and natural polymeric 3D scaffolds for bone tissue engineering (BTE) and regenerative therapies. The review comprehensively discusses the implications of biological macromolecules, structure, and composition of polymeric scaffolds used in BTE. Various approaches to fabricating 3D BTE scaffolds are discussed, including solvent casting and particle leaching, freeze-drying, thermally induced phase separation, gas foaming, electrospinning, and sol-gel techniques. Rapid prototyping technologies such as stereolithography, fused deposition modeling, selective laser sintering, and 3D bioprinting are also covered. The immunomodulatory roles of polymeric scaffolds utilized for BTE applications are discussed. In addition, the features and challenges of 3D polymer scaffolds fabricated using advanced additive manufacturing technologies (rapid prototyping) are addressed and compared to conventional subtractive manufacturing techniques. Finally, the challenges of applying scaffold-based BTE treatments in practice are discussed in-depth.
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DOI: 10.3390/bioengineering10020204
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