Designing of macroporous polymeric materials for bioengineering applications
Macroporous polymeric materials are three-dimensional porous architectures having enormous utility in biomedical, biotechnological and separation sciences. The ultimate potential for these applications rests upon their chemical and morphological characteristics, which to a great extent are regulated by their fabrication approaches. Many techniques have been investigated in recent years to form highly porous biodegradable scaffolds suitable for use in tissue engineering. Many of these methods are able to form foams with high porosity to encourage cell attachment. These methods exhibit good biocompatibility,making these techniques especially promising for future use in tissue-engineered cell-polymer constructs. Thus realizing the crucial role ofmacroporous polymeric materials in tissue engineering and allied fields the present review discusses various synthetic routes of macroporous materials and presents a concise but critical analysis of strategies adopted by various workers. This review discusses applications in which fast swelling is needed.