Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) for tissue engineering applications: Biotransformation of palm oil mill effluent (POME) to value-added polymers

The study of cancer cell has been hindered by the lack of appropriate ex vivo models,which can mimic this microenvironment. it is hypothesized that the fabrication of porous 3-d scaffolds for the biomimetics growth of cancer cells ex vivo could facilitate the study of the disease in its native 3-d niche. for that reason,biomaterials are used for fabrication of 3-d scaffold,in general,may be natural polymers such as proteins,collagens and gelatin,or synthetic biopolymers. among the various available biodegradable polymers,polyhydroxyalkanoates (phas) have gained significant interest as one of the value-added materials which can be synthesized from abundantly available source of palm oil mill effluent (pome). down the group of the pha,poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (phb) and copolymerizing this phb that produced phbvs; these two polymers have the most prevalent polymer used for scaffolds fabrication. a physico-chemical and biological modification has developed to improve wetting,adhesion,and printing of polymer surfaces,generally by introducing a variety of polar groups. these techniques must be tailored to introduce a specific functional group when the surface modification is a precursor to attach a bioactive compound. there are a few methods in order to fabricate porous 3-d scaffolds such as solvent casting,particulate leaching,thermally induced phase separation,gas forming,fiber bonding,electrospinning and also solid free form method. a review of the polyhydroxyalkanoates (phas) for tissue engineering applications is presented,beginning with the basic naturally derived polymerization of phas,biotransformation of palm oil mill effluent (pome) to the value-added polymers,novel methods of scaffold fabrication capabilities and its physico- chemical and biological surface modifications to increase cell-biomaterial affinity. © 2016 penerbit utm press. all rights reserved.