Craniomaxillofacial Bone Engineering by Scaffolds Loaded with Stem Cells: A Systematic Review

The concept of tissue engineering holds huge promise for thefuture treatment of osseous defects. For bone tissue engineering, stem cells are applied on supporting scaffolds under controlled stimulation with growth factors. Scaffolds are provisional matrices for bone growth providing a specific environment for tissue development and favoring cellular attachment, growth and differentiation. To date, ceramics, polymers, and composite scaffolds have been widely used for bone tissue engineering in various in-vitro and animal studies. The objective of this article was to review the advances in jaw bone engineering from a scaffold material point of view. A review of literature was carried out by using Medline database and searching topics like “craniomaxillofacial tissue engineering”, “bone regeneration”, “scaffold”, “oral surgery”, “stem cell+ scaffold”, “xenograft” and “allograft”.Animal and human studies evaluating repair of craniomaxillofacial defects with scaffold and stem cells, were considered in this study. A total of 64 studies were evaluated. Based on the results of this literature review, although autogenous bone grafting has remained the preferred strategy for treatment of bone defects, rapid prototyping (RP) techniques do offer great opportunities to generate suitable scaffolds for bone tissue engineering in near future.