Scaffold design principles
Porosity, strength, and degradation rate — the competing requirements every scaffold has to reconcile.
A scaffold is the structural corner of the tissue-engineering triad: a three-dimensional template cells occupy while they rebuild tissue. Its requirements conflict with one another, and design is largely the management of that conflict.
It must be porous, with interconnected pores large enough for cells to migrate through and for vessels to grow in — but porosity removes material, and material is what carries load. It must degrade, handing responsibility to new tissue — but degrade too fast and the construct collapses, too slow and it obstructs the tissue it was meant to host. It must be biocompatible, and its degradation products must not provoke a damaging response — a point that connects directly to Immunomodulation in regeneration.
Surface chemistry matters as much as bulk geometry, because cells read the material as if it were matrix. That is why families as different as ceramics, polymers, and hydrogels each suit different tissues.
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