Silk scaffolds for tissue engineering in dentistry

Oral diseases such as dental caries, periodontitis, and oral cancer have the potential to significantly compromise an individual’s life. Furthermore, due to the prominent location of the oral region, diseases in this location have a particular impact on the patient's quality of life and mental well-being. To date, many of the current clinical treatments have limitations, leading to an urgent need for a tissue engineering approach to regenerate damaged oral tissues and restore aesthetics. Silk-based biomaterial scaffolds have been extensively used for soft and hard tissue engineering and thus are an excellent candidate for use in dental tissue engineering. This chapter discusses the clinical challenges in dentistry and the current status of dental tissue engineering. We also look at the future potential of silk scaffolds; for example, how silk biomaterials can be adapted to form a wide range of structures, how they can be modified with drugs or other growth factors, and how they could be used in future dental tissue engineering to treat a wide range of diseases (dental caries, periodontal diseases, traumatic tooth injury, oral mucosa diseases, salivary glands dysfunction, alveolar bone desorption and craniofacial bone loss, and temporomandibular joint cartilage injury).