Contribution of Physical Methods in Decellularization of Animal Tissues

Biologic scaffolds composed of extracellular matrix (ECM) are frequently used for clinical purposes of tissue regeneration. Different methods have been developed for this purpose. All methods of decellularization including chemical and physical approaches leave some damage on the ECM; however, the effects of these methods are different which make some of these procedures more proper to maintain ECM structure than other methods. This review is aimed to introduce and compare new physical methods for the decellularization of different tissues and organs in tissue engineering. All recent reports and research that have used at least one physical method in the procedure of decellularization, were included and evaluated in this paper. The advantages and drawbacks of each method were examined and compared considering the effectiveness. This review tried to highlight the prospective potentials and benefits of applying physical methods for decellularization protocols in tissue engineering instead of the current chemical methods. These chemical methods are harsh in nature and were shown to be destructive and harmful to essential substances of ECM and scaffold structure. Therefore, using physical methods as a partial or even a whole protocol could save time, costs, and quality of the final acellular tissue in complicated decellularization procedures. Moreover, regarding the control factor that could be achieved easily with physical methods, optimization of different decellularization protocols would be quite satisfactory. Combined methods take advantage of both chemical and physical approaches.