Electrospun Polymeric Composites for Dental Tissue Engineering: Materials, Fabrication Strategies, Biological Performance, and Clinical Translation
Oral diseases impact approximately 3.5 billion individuals globally, often leading to the loss or damage of periodontal, alveolar bone, dentin-pulp, or oral soft tissues. Consequently, dental tissue engineering necessitates scaffolds that can simultaneously offer a three-dimensional extracellular matrix-like microenvironment conducive to cell adhesion, migration, and differentiation. These scaffolds must also maintain spatial and mechanical integrity during the healing process and degrade at a rate that aligns with new tissue formation. Conventional biomaterials frequently fail to meet all these criteria. Natural polymers, such as collagen, provide cell-recognition cues and support cellular responses but may lose mechanical integrity before regeneration is complete. In contrast, many synthetic polymer barriers maintain structural stability and offer adjustable degradation rates but exhibit limited intrinsic bioactivity. Electrospinning offers a method to integrate these complementary characteristics into fibrous scaffolds with high surface areas that replicate essential structural aspects of the native extracellular matrix. This structure provides cells with a greater surface area for adhesion, migration, and remodeling than cast films or solid scaffolds. This review brings together the electrospinning literature related to dental applications. It begins with the basics of the process, including Taylor cone formation, jet whipping, and the solution, instrument, and environmental factors that influence fiber diameter and morphology, as well as variations such as coaxial, emulsion, melt electrowriting, and needleless electrospinning. It then explores the natural, synthetic, and composite polymer systems used to produce dental nanofibers and their applications in periodontal regeneration, alveolar bone repair, dentin-pulp regeneration, antibacterial and drug delivery functions, and oral wound healing. The obstacles, such as low production throughput, inconsistent sterilization and testing protocols, and the scarcity of large-animal and human trials, that still hinder the transition of laboratory-scale electrospun scaffolds to regular use in dental practice are discussed, and the research directions most likely to bridge this gap are highlighted.