Nanostructured Materials in Tissue Engineering

Over the past thirty years, interest in how mammalian cells interact with materials has exploded, with applications ranging from diagnostic in vitro testing, to bioprocess engineering with microcarriers, and to tissue engineering. This interest has paralleled a revolution in material processing methods which allow scientists and engineers to create an enormous variety of micro- and nanotopological features. By studying aspects of cell behavior such as gene expression, viability, motility, and fate when cells are presented with simple architectural elements, biomedical engineers hope to build a toolbox of topological features that can be deployed to solve specific tissue engineering problems. In this chapter, we first discuss fundamental molecular biology-based mechanisms behind cell–material interactions and then focus specifically on mammalian cell interactions with nanofibers, nanofibrous microspheres, nanogrooves, nanopits, nanotubes, and nanopillars, along with their applications in tissue engineering.