There have been significant developments in the area of bone tissue engineering since its advent in terms of biomaterials as well as techniques of scaffold fabrication. Despite all these developments, the translation of research to clinical applications is very limited. The most challenging obstacle in the road of translation of engineered tissue construct into clinical applications is the manufacturing of the designed substitutes in a scalable manner. This bottleneck could be overcome by using bioreactors for the manufacture of tissue constructs. In this review, a current scenario of bone defects and cause of translational gap between laboratory research and clinical use has been briefly discussed. Furthermore, various types of bioreactors being used in the area of bone tissue regeneration in recent studies have been highlighted along with their advantages and limitations. After literature survey, we found that bioreactors should have the following attribute: (i) A dynamic combined bioreactor providing more than one physico-mechanical cues; (ii) Support the growth of multiple tissue engineered constructs simultaneously along with homogeneous distribution of cells throughout the scaffolds; (iii) Versatile to support different types of scaffolds and cell types to produce a patient/defect specific tissue construct as well as to fulfill the adequate supply demand for clinical applications; (iv) Automated with easy to operate protocols for minimal manual handling; (v) Effectively handled and reproducible; and (vi) Commercialization aspects, quality control and safely requirements. Furthermore, computational approaches could be combined with bone tissue engineering experiments using bioreactors to simulate and optimize the cellular growth in bone tissue constructs.

Cancer is one of the major health-related issues affecting the population worldwide and subsequently accounts for the second-largest death. Genetic and epigenetic modifications in oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes affect the regulatory systems that lead to the initiation and progression of cancer. Conventional methods, including chemotherapy/radiotherapy/appropriate combinational therapy and surgery, are being widely used for theranostics of cancer patients. Surgery is useful in treating localized tumors, but it is ineffective in treating metastatic tumors, which spread to other organs and result in a high recurrence rate and death. Also, the therapeutic application of free drugs is related to substantial issues such as poor absorption, solubility, bioavailability, high degradation rate, short shelf-life, and low therapeutic index. Therefore, these issues can be sorted out using nano lipid-based carriers (NLBCs) as promising drug delivery carriers. Still, at most, they fail to achieve site targeted drug delivery and detection. This can be achieved by selecting a specific ligand/antibody for its cognate receptor molecule expressed on the cancer cell surface. In this review, we have mainly discussed the various types of ligands used to decorate NLBCs. A list of the ligands used to design nanocarriers to target malignant cells specifically has been extensively undertaken, and the approved ligand decorated lipid-based nanomedicines with their clinical status has been explained in tabulated form to provide a wider scope to the readers regarding ligand coupled NLBCs.

Silk is a fibrous protein, has been a part of human lives for centuries and was used as suture and textile material. Silk is mainly produced by members of certain arthropods such as spiders, butterflies, mites, and moths. However, recent biotechnological advances have revolutionized silk as a biomaterial for various applications ranging from diverse sensors to robust fibers. The biocompatibility, mechanical resilience, and biodegradability of the material make it a suitable candidate for biomaterials. Silk can also be easily converted into several morphological forms, including fibers, films, sponges, and hydrogels. Provided these abilities, silk has received excellent traction from scientists worldwide for various developments, one of them being its use as a bio-sensor. The diversity of silk materials offers various options, giving scientists the freedom to choose from and personalize them as per their needs. In this review, we foremost look upon the composition, production, properties, and various morphologies of silk. The numerous applications of silk and its derivatives for fabricating biosensors to detect small molecules, macromolecules, and cells have been explored comprehensively. Also, the data from various globally developed sensors using silk have been described into organized tables for each category of molecules, along with their important analytical details.