ABSTRACT
Tissue engineering has always been a hot spot in the life science area over the past few years. However, there are some problems, such as the multiplication of seeding cells, the preparation of tissue engineering scaffolds, and the controlled release of drugs from scaffolds and so on. Recently microspheres have been widely used to solve these problems. For example, microspheres are used as microcarriers to culture seeding cells. In addition, microsphers can be either used to prepare engineering scaffolds or directly used as scaffolds. Microspheres can be used to load drugs and control the drug release as well. In this paper the application of microspheres in tissue engineering is reviewed and the up-to-date methods are introduced, including ways of improving performances of microcarriers, preparing scaffolds with microspheres and adding drug-loaded microspheres into scaffolds.