Biomaterials And Tissue Engineering
There is often a lack of clinical graft options or limitations with the ones currently used clinically. There are a variety of biomaterial strategies for the development of synthetic or naturally-derived medical devices. Tissue engineering uses degradable biomaterials and seeks to develop alternative grafts for patients by better understanding how cells interact with the environment around them and apply this knowledge to develop strategies to produce tissue engineered grafts. One of the advantages of tissue engineered grafts is that are designed to better integrate with the body by degrading and being replaced with new tissue. This is a very interdisciplinary field and involves material science, cell biology, physiology, biomechanics, and transport phenomena. Further, this knowledge is applied to the different components of a tissue engineering strategy, including scaffold fabrication, stem cells, bioreactors, and drug delivery. This provides a variety of options for both undergraduate and graduate students who study in this area.