Biomaterials and their potential applications for dental tissue engineering

Engineering oral tissues as a multidisciplinary approach to build complex structures such as bone, teeth or soft dental tissues remains a challenging endeavor which will also require significant additional development of materials chemistry before it will be successful. We will highlight areas of recent success and describe major challenges which the materials chemistry community, in collaboration with clinicians, must still overcome. The isolation of stem cell populations from various sources in the oral cavity and advances in utilizing their differentiation potential has been driving the field forward. So far, bioinert materials have mainly been used as carriers and delivery vehicles, relying on the intrinsic cellular competence to form tissues. As this may not suffice to induce regeneration, there is a need for novel biomimetic scaffolds capable of providing chemical and mechanical cues to promote multiple specific interactions between cells and matrix. These signals can orchestrate processes such as cell adhesion, migration, differentiation, matrix synthesis, mineralization, and/or vasculogenesis. In this review, we give a brief description of oral anatomy and pathology, state-of-the-art treatment methods and their shortcomings. We provide an overview of current strategies to fabricate bioactive matrices, with an emphasis on nanostructured materials, and we suggest design principles for scaffolding systems specifically tailored towards dental tissue regeneration. In this review, we envision future approaches based on these emerging areas that rely on recent developments in tissue engineering and stem cell research. At the interface between material science and biology, cellular response can be controlled by materials chemistry, and potential applications for regenerative strategies are evolving.