Supercritical fluids in 3-D tissue engineering

Tissue engineering is aimed at repairing damaged tissues; several techniques and materials, prevalently polymers, have been proposed to produce synthetic scaffolds that can mimic the extracellular matrix of the organ to be repaired. The scope is to induce adhesion, growth, migration and differentiation of autologous cells and all these steps are promoted by structural, micrometric and nanometric characteristics of the scaffold environment. mits of traditional techniques used to produce scaffolds are organic solvent residues and limited process flexibility; therefore, supercritical CO2 assisted processes are emerging in this field to try to overcome these limitations. In this work these techniques are critically reviewed with a particular attention to those devoted to the production of 3-D scaffolds; we propose a comparison with the traditional techniques, the analysis of their potential and the obtained results.