Regenerative medicine is a new and promising medical method aiming at treating patients with defective or dysfunctional tissues by maintaining or enhancing the biological activity of cells. The development of biomaterial-based technologies, such as cell scaffolds and carriers for drug delivery system, are highly required to promote the regenerative research and regenerative therapy. Nucleic acids are one of the most feasible factors to efficiently modify the biological activity of cells. The effective and stable delivery of nucleic acids into cells is highly required to succeed in the modification. Biomaterials-based non-viral carriers or biological carriers, like exosomes, play an important role in the efficient delivery of nucleic acids. This review introduces the examples of regenerative research and regenerative therapy based on the delivery of nucleic acids with biomaterials technologies and emphasizes their importance to accomplish regenerative medicine.
Keywords: Biomaterials; CRISPR, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats; Cas, CRISPR-associated systems; Cell scaffold; DDS, drug delivery system; Drug delivery system; ECM, extracellular matrix; MSC, mesenchymal stem cells; Nucleic acids; PEG, polyethylene glycol; PLGA, poly(d,l-lactic acid-co-glycolic acid); RISC, RNA-induced silencing complex; RNAi, RNA interferince; Regenerative research; Regenerative therapy; TALEN, transcription activator-like effector nuclease; ZFN, zinc finger nucleases; lncRNA, long non-coding RNA; mRNA, messenger RNA; miRNA, microRNA; siRNA, small interfering RNA.