Conventionally, the patients with diseased/damaged liver are treated with liver transplantation. However, the donor scarcity remains the fundamental issue with such treatment. This has led to the development of bioartificial liver assist devices to bridge patients until they either recover or receive liver transplant. In the development of bioartificial liver assist devices, configuration of the bioreactor that consists of cultured hepatocytes within solid substrate known as scaffold, is considered to be one of the major challenges. This book reports the development of a novel...

Scaffold-based tissue engineering approach has gained high potential to treat patient with damaged or diseased organ. The scaffold should be biocompatible and bioresorbable, while providing necessary mechanical strength. Therefore, the major challenge in the field of tissue engineering is to design suitable scaffolds that can mimic the structure and function of the natural extracellular matrix (ECM). To date, various scaffolds have been developed with various materials and techniques. However, in many cases the developed scaffolds remain less than practical in terms of structural ...