The Chicken Egg: An Advanced Material for Tissue Engineering.

The chicken egg, an excellent natural source of proteins, has been an overlooked native biomaterial with remarkable physicochemical, structural, and biological properties. Recently, with significant advances in biomedical engineering, particularly in the development of 3D in vitro platforms, chicken egg materials have increasingly been investigated as biomaterials due to their distinct advantages such as their low cost, availability, easy handling, gelling ability, bioactivity, and provision of a developmentally stimulating environment for cells. In addition, the chicken egg and its by-products can improve tissue engraftment and stimulate angiogenesis, making it particularly attractive for wound healing and tissue engineering applications.

Egg White Alginate as a Novel Scaffold Biomaterial for 3D Salivary Cell Culturing.

Saliva production by salivary glands play a crucial role in oral health. The loss of salivary gland function could lead to xerostomia, a condition also known as dry mouth. Significant reduction in saliva production could lead to further complications such as difficulty in speech, mastication, and increased susceptibility to dental caries and oral infections and diseases.

The Optimization of a Novel Hydrogel-Egg White-Alginate for 2.5D Tissue Engineering of Salivary Spheroid-Like Structure.

Hydrogels have been used for a variety of biomedical applications; in tissue engineering, they are commonly used as scaffolds to cultivate cells in a three-dimensional (3D) environment allowing the formation of organoids or cellular spheroids. Egg white-alginate (EWA) is a novel hydrogel which combines the advantages of both egg white and alginate; the egg white material provides extracellular matrix (ECM)-like proteins that can mimic the ECM microenvironment, while alginate can be tuned mechanically through its ionic crosslinking property to modify the scaffold's porosity, strength, and stiffness. In this study, a frozen calcium chloride (CaCl) disk technique to homogenously crosslink alginate and egg white hydrogel is presented for 2.

Smart Hydrogels in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine.

The field of regenerative medicine has tremendous potential for improved treatment outcomes and has been stimulated by advances made in bioengineering over the last few decades. The strategies of engineering tissues and assembling functional constructs that are capable of restoring, retaining, and revitalizing lost tissues and organs have impacted the whole spectrum of medicine and health care. Techniques to combine biomimetic materials, cells, and bioactive molecules play a decisive role in promoting the regeneration of damaged tissues or as therapeutic systems.

The Applications of 3D Printing for Craniofacial Tissue Engineering.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is an emerging technology in the field of dentistry. It uses a layer-by-layer manufacturing technique to create scaffolds that can be used for dental tissue engineering applications. While several 3D printing methodologies exist, such as selective laser sintering or fused deposition modeling, this paper will review the applications of 3D printing for craniofacial tissue engineering; in particular for the periodontal complex, dental pulp, alveolar bone, and cartilage.

Broccoli extract improves chemotherapeutic drug efficacy against head-neck squamous cell carcinomas.

The efficacy of cisplatin (CIS) and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) against squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck (SCCHN) remains restricted due to their severe toxic side effects on non-cancer (normal) tissues. Recently, the broccoli extract sulforaphane (SF) was successfully tested as a combination therapy to target cancer cells. However, the effect of lower doses of CIS or 5-FU combined with SF on SCCHN remained unknown.