A Short Review on Nanostructured Carbon Containing Biopolymer Derived Composites for Tissue Engineering Applications

Abstract

The development of new scaffolds and materials for tissue engineering is a wide and open realm of material science. Among solutions, the use of biopolymers represents a particularly interesting area of study due to their great chemical complexity that enables creation of specific molecular architectures. However, biopolymers do not exhibit the properties required for direct application in tissue repair-such as mechanical and electrical properties-but they do show very attractive chemical functionalities which are difficult to produce through in vitro synthesis. The combination of biopolymers with nanostructured carbon fillers could represent a robust solution to enhance composite properties, producing composites with new and unique features, particularly relating to electronic conduction. In this paper, we provide a review of the field of carbonaceous nanostructure-containing biopolymer composites, limiting our investigation to tissue-engineering applications, and providing a complete overview of the recent and most outstanding achievements.

Keywords: biopolymers; carbon nanotubes; graphene; scaffolds; tissue engineering.

Figure 1

Multiple polymer- and polymer-composite-based routes to tissue engineering, highlighting the main morphologies used. Reprint with permission from Nikolova et al. [13] under CC BY license.

Figure 2

Schematic route of the cellular uptake of both neat CNTs and graphene-related materials. Reprinted with permission from Bussy et al. [27] (Copyright 2012 American Chemical Society).

Figure 3

Methodologies for the production of graphene and related material structures through the oxidation of graphite. Reprinted from Jimenez-Cervantes et al. [28] under CC BY license.

Figure 4

Theoretical folding of a perfect graphene sheet according to different linear combinations of the chiral vectors, leading to the three main CNT structures, named armchair, zig-zag and chiral. Reprinted with permission from Sanginario et al. [55] under CC BY license.