REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1629292
This article is part of the Research TopicTissue Engineering Strategies and Biomaterials in Oral and Maxillofacial Hard Tissue Injury RepairView all 9 articles
Smart materials: innovative strategies for oral-maxillofacial bone defects repair
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Stomatology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Hospital Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
- 2School of Stomatology, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
- 3Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Oral and Maxillofacial Development and Regeneration, Wuhan, China
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Oral-maxillofacial bone defects complicated by tumors, infections, or other bone diseases pose a significant clinical challenge. Traditional tissue-engineered bone substitute still has limitations regarding its three elements that resulting in unsatisfactory regeneration capability. Smart materials are a cutting-edge type of functional materials that can sense and respond to a wide range of environmental conditions or stimuli, including optical, electrical, magnetic, mechanical, thermal, and chemical signals. According to the type of stimulus to which the materials respond, they can be classified into externally stimulated materials and internally stimulated materials. This review, based on the latest advances in smart materials for bone defect repair, summarizes the different stimulusresponsive strategies of smart materials and the materials under each strategy. It also discusses the classic biomedical applications of these materials in the repair of oral-maxillofacial bone injuries in recent studies, compares the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies, and discusses the current challenges and future prospects of smart materials.
Keywords: smart materials, stimuli-responsive materials, bone tissue engineering, oral-maxillofacial bone, Bone repair and regeneration
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yu, Liu, Qin, Song and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ke Song, Department of Stomatology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Hospital Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Lianyi Xu, Department of Stomatology, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Hospital Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
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