Bio-inspired Regenerative Medicine: Materials, Processes and Clinical Applications

The field of regenerative medicine is today a melting pot of interdisciplinary competences spanning from materials science, biology and medicine. Indeed, only strong interdisciplinary approaches can successfully face the challenge to establish new regenerative therapies significantly improving the life quality of millions of people worldwide. As biomaterials play a major role in this field, material scientists are being increasingly pushed to develop advanced constructs mimicking the extracellular matrix in a tissue-specific fashion. In this respect the driving concept is biomimetics, pinning on both a close reproduction of the physic-chemical, morphological and mechanical features of the host tissues, and on smart functionalization, aiming to provide the biomaterials with ability of smart response to specific physiological conditions and, possibly, of boosting the regenerative cascade. With this in mind, the book was conceived and developed to capture broad interest among young chemists, physicists, engineers and biologists acting in biomaterials development. After an introduction describing the most recent trends in regenerative medicine, each of the following chapters is dedicated to specific topics and application fields, so that they are stand-alone contributions that can be consulted independently. We thank Pan Stanford Publishing for having invited us to edit such a book and all the authors for having accepted to contribute to it. We hope that the book may provide the readers with a good overview of the recent advances in this important field and possibly be a source of inspiration for new research.