Application and characteristics of silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold in orthopaedic regenerative medicine / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: A silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold has good biocompatibility, osteoinductivity and degradability.OBJECTIVE: To review the structure, performance and application of the silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold in bone,cartilage and soft tissue engineering regeneration.METHODS: PubMed, Wanfang, and CNKI databases were retrieved by computer for articles related to the structure, performance and application of the silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold in orthopedics published from 1998 to 2016. The keywords were chitosan, silk protein, bone tissue engineering in English and Chinese, respectively.RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold is characterized by good biocompatibility, bone inductivity and biodegradability that make cells grow well on the scaffold. The silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold has been widely used in bone tissue engineering, and has a prominent performance in bone defect repair and cartilage injury treatment. Meanwhile, the silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold exerts a crucial role in wound healing as well as in the treatment of spinal nerve injury and other soft tissue injuries. However, the silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold currently is less reported in the clinical use due to various reasons, and it will be the main research direction of future efforts. As is known to us, silk protein can be used to prepare the cruciate ligament and construct tissue-engineered nuclei; therefore, the silk fibroin/chitosan scaffold can be developed in the treatment of tendon ligament injury and intervertebral disc tissue engineering.