ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Hyaluronic acid, as an important part of extracellular matrix, plays an important role in various biological processes. Hyaluronic acid has good biocompatibility, biodegradability and non-immunogenicity. It is an ideal raw material to prepare a variety of materials with different morphologies, hardness, and bioactivities. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the effect of hyaluronic acid and its derivatives on osteoblast growth and differentiation. METHODS: The CNKI and PubMed databases were searched with the key words of "hyaluronic acid, osteoblast" in Chinese and English, respectively. Initially 81 articles were retrieved, and only 34 eligible articles were included in result analysis after removal of unrelated or duplicate literature. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Hyaluronic acid has been widely used in the studies on cell adhesion and migration, angiogenesis and morphogenesis, wound healing, inflammation and cancer metastasis. Hyaluronic acid and its related biomaterials have a positive effect on osteoblast growth and differentiation. Hyaluronic acid and its related biomaterials can serve as molecular chaperones to protect the encapsulated growth factors and drugs, and release them in specific sites to achieve the regulation of desired cellular functions. As a potential new clinical biomaterial, it can be used for the development of tissue engineering scaffolds, drug sustained-release media, and growth factor targeting vectors. As the modern medicine is focusing on the "interdisciplinary", hyaluronic acid hydrogel materials that are more intelligent and personalized will be the research focus of future medical materials.