Recent Patents on Polymeric Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering

The past several decades have seen explosive growth in the reports of tissue engineering for tissue repair. All scaffolds of tissue engineering are made of special materials, known as biomaterials, which have been defined as “materials intended to interface with biological systems to evaluate, treat, augment or replace any tissue, organ, or function of the body” [D.F. Williams, The Williams Dictionary of Biomaterials, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1999]. The present article discusses the useful patents in the field of the polymeric biomaterials that are currently developed as scaffolds with their intrinsic physicochemical and dimensional properties for the application towards recent therapeutic strategies for tissue engineering including soft and hard tissue engineering.