Maria Yanez, James Blanchette and Ehsan Jabbarzadeh* Pages 6347 - 6357 ( 11 )
Tissue engineering offers a promising strategy to restore injuries resulting from trauma, infection, tumor resection, or other diseases. In spite of significant progress, the field faces a significant bottleneck; the critical need to understand and exploit the interdependencies of tissue healing, angiogenesis, and inflammation. Inherently, the balance of these interacting processes is affected by a number of injury site conditions that represent a departure from physiological environment, including reduced pH, increased concentration of free radicals, hypoglycemia, and hypoxia. Efforts to harness the potential of immune response as a therapeutic strategy to promote tissue repair have led to identification of natural compounds with significant anti-inflammatory properties. This article provides a concise review of the body’s inflammatory response to biomaterials and describes the role of oxygen as a physiological cue in this process. We proceed to highlight the potential of natural compounds to mediate inflammatory response and improve host-graft integration. Herein, we discuss the use of natural compounds to map signaling molecules and checkpoints that regulate the cross-linkage of immune response and skeletal repair.
Inflammatory response, biomaterials, angiogenesis, tissue engineering, macrophages, natural compounds.
Department of Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, Biomedical Engineering Program, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208