Special Issue "Fibrous Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering"

Assistant Editor
Mr. Vincent Milleret
Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
E-Mail: vincent.milleret@mat.ethz.ch
Interests: tissue engineering; production and processing of polymer scaffolds; polymer surface modification

We are sorry to announce that Dr. Heike Hall (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) passed away on 22 July 2011 after a long fight with disease. In addition to being the initial Guest Editor for this special issue, she was a key Editorial Board member of the journal Materials and will be greatly missed.

Dear Collegues,

Scaffolds for tissue engineering need to fulfil many requirements. Inspired by the architecture of native extracellular matrix, fibrous scaffolds are regarded to be a promising solution for engineered tissue-substitutes as they provide some key features, being the fiber structure itself presenting a large surface area for cell attachment, comparatively high interfiber distances allowing cell infiltration, nutrition and gas exchange and structural support that can be adjusted according to the needs of the tissue to be replaced.
In this special issue different ways of production of fibrous scaffolds for tissue engineering will be introduced and their advantaged discussed. The main focus will be on electrospun scaffolds as this technique allows producing controlled fibers assembling to fiber fleeces containing randomly oriented or aligned fibers. The materials that can be used vary from native macromolecules to purely synthetic polymers, even metals and ceramics have been described. Electrospinning allows large production of fibrous scaffold and might therefore be a very elegant, cost-efficient and versatile technique to be applied for production of scaffolds in tissue engineering.
Several applications for fibrous scaffolds in hollow organ tissue engineering such as cardiovascular devices, bladder and trachea will be discussed.

Heike Hall
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Materials is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs).

• tissue engineering
• fibrous scaffolds
• electrospinning
• porosity
• drug delivery