It seems certain that nature has created living systems with a nearly perfect functionality based essentially on a hierarchical structure of biomolecules, cells and tissues and a likewise perfect three-dimensional architecture.
It is certain that all attempts to reconstruct any such biosystems with the claim to engineer equivalent artificial matrices must consider the real physiological complexity of living systems.
The basic goals of all the endeavours made during the last decades in tissue engineering were to regenerate diseased, injured, or disordered tissues. Scaffolds take over the basic function to act as a kind of artificial template for tissue formation and must, therefore, be designed according to some important physiological requirements. Besides biocompatibility, biodegradability, stiffness and the underlying manufacturing technology, the scaffold architecture plays a crucial role in order to guarantee functional tissue regeneration.
Recent developments in the design of innovative biomaterials have been directed towards the use of materials that are equipped with real three-dimensional biointerfaces to mimic the natural situation for example within the extracellular matrix (ECM).
On this background a research programme entitled ''Design and monitoring of ECM-analogue biointerfaces for biomedicine and bioanalytics'' with the goal to develop appropriate manufacturing technologies able to structure synthetic and natural biomaterials on the micro-and nanoscale was initiated and carried out in Thuringia (Germany) between 2007 and 2010. Related contributions from the Institute for Bioprocessing and Analytical Measurement Technologies (iba)/Heiligenstadt and INNOVENT Technology Development/Jena are focussed to the development of twophoton-polymerisation (2PP) as a scalable manufacturing technology to provide three-dimensional biointerfaces. Aspects concerning materials development and processing technology were investigated that show the enormous potential and the excellent possibilies of 2PP.
Alternative technological approaches were investigated by the Institute of Materials Science and Technology (IMT) at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena based on the Layer-by-Layer (LbL) deposition of polyelectrolytes combined with micro-contact printing (mCP) also to provide a three-dimensional template for tissue integration. This issue of Advanced Biomaterial presents some of the results of this research in the manuscripts by WeiΓ, Berg and Heurich.
All of these efforts are part of an integrated strategy toward the development of three-dimensional biointerfaces as one essential prerequisite to transfer tissue engineered products to clinical application in the near future.