Three-Dimensional Self-healing Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Applications

Self-healing property is the most important inherent quality of the living system. For the synthetic materials used as tissue engineering scaffolds, in addition to the basic supportive structure, added self-healing capability is also necessary. If the structure is having self-healing property the patient will bet the benefit of a quick recovery and these supports reduce the need for revision surgery. For tissue engineering applications, polymer scaffolds were highly suitable for the incorporation of cells and growth-stimulating hormones in the native tissue. Even though hydrogels were the first man-made biomaterial, the material optimization was much restricted for tissue engineering applications. With the discoveries of supramolecular chemistry, a lot of self-assembled structuring was explored. And also, by understanding the systems chemistry, bioinspired polymerization-based self-healing hydrogels were being explored. The field of supramolecular chemistry is old as 50 decades, however, the application of polymerization by non-covalent interaction of biomedical applications was explored lesser compare to other optoelectronic and mechanical applications. This book chapter will be give details about the need for self-healing scaffolds, prepared by supramolecular polymerization for 3D structuring towards tissue engineering applications is discussed in detail. The discussion of supramolecular bonding includes hydrogen bonding, electrostatic interaction, metal–ligand, host–guest interaction and π–π interaction. Also, a comparative outline of the need for tissue-engineering scaffolds properties in terms of rheology, mechanical property and shape memory effect of these polymerization interactions was amended.