Editorial: Biofunctional biomaterials and cellular systems for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes

Contemporary tissue engineering requires development of biofunctional implantable devices (scaffold or scaffold-free) that will interact with the host and promote functional repair and regeneration through their therapeutic capacity (Zeugolis and Pandit 2015, Thomas et al 2016). Simultaneously, current drug discovery demands tools and technologies that will accurately recapitulate human pathophysiologies in vitro for diagnostic purposes (Cigognini et al 2013, Gaspar and Zeugolis 2016, Shologu et al 2016). In either case, appropriate biophysical, biochemical and biological cues are required to modulate cell behaviour in vitro and in vivo. For example, cell adhesion, alignment and differentiation can be guided by the introduction of surface topographies (Dalby et al 2007, Lim and Donahue 2007, Nikkhah et al 2012, Denchai et al 2018). However, such, rather 2D systems have failed to guide neotissue formation in vivo (Azeem et al 2015, English et al 2015) and triggered investigations into orientated 3D architectures (Abbah et al 2015, Derakhshanfar et al 2018, Jin et al 2018, Rose and De Laporte 2018, Liu et al 2018b). It should also be noted that in vivo, cells frequently respond to spatially and timely distinct profiles of a variety of biochemical signals, which guide their growth and differentiation during development and regeneration. In disease and injury, the regulation of biochemical signals is compromised, resulting in cell death and impaired tissue regeneration. Thus, implantable devices and in vitro models seek to recapitulate physiological and diseased biochemical signals to control cell fate (Sart et al 2013, Gvaramia et al 2017, Tatapudy et al 2017, Choi et al 2018, Muncie and Weaver 2018). Biological cues, such as growth factors, cytokines and hormones control and regulate cellular growth, proliferation and differentiation through autocrine and paracrine signalling (Barrientos et al 2008, Hwang et al 2008). Advanced biomaterial technologies aim to deliver multiple cargos to accurate capture the multifaceted in vivo milieu (Pugliese et al 2018).

This special issue provides insight into recent progresses in the fabrication and functionalisation of biofunctional materials prompted by the need to closely imitate the complex physiological and pathophysiological in vivo environment. Among others, bioreactor (Shen et al 2018) and magnetically assisted strategies (Goncalves et al 2018) to control cell fate, conjugation approaches to couple extracellular matrix antibodies to fluorophores (Leferink et al 2018), cell (Gionet-Gonzales and Leach, 2018, Zurina et al 2018) and scaffold (Bourkoula et al 2018, Grebenik et al 2018, Krukiewicz et al 2018, Kundu et al 2018, Townsend et al 2018, Fuller et al 2019)-based systems that closely imitate native extracellular matrix assemblies, antioxidant strategies that supress excessive reactive oxygen species and regulate redox balance inside cells, thus eliminating inflammation and dysfunction (Ikeda and Nagasaki, 2018), and delivery vehicles for guided tissue regeneration (Naqvi et al 2018, Yin et al 2018, Liu et al 2018a) are discussed.

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