Physical cues of biomaterials guide stem cell differentiation fate

Millions of people lose or damage their organs or tissues due to disease, birth defects, or accidents each year. Stem cells, such as embryonic stem cells (ESC), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), adult stem cells, and fetal stem cells are an attractive prospect for regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. The pluripotent nature of ESCs and iPSCs opens many avenues for potential stem cell-based regenerative therapies and the development of drug discovery platforms. Nowadays, it is difficult to find novel biomolecules for differentiation of stem cells and to find much higher efficiency of stem cell differentiation into desired lineages solely by combination of these biomolecules in culture medium. Biomaterials for stem cell culture are focused as a tool for finetuning of stem cell differentiation, because it is quite recent for researchers to realize biomaterials can guide stem cell fate of differentiation.