A variety of natural and synthetic polymers is commonly used in musculoskeletal tissue engineering. Collagen is a particularly promising material for musculoskeletal tissue engineering, especially for use in connective tissue regeneration. While most collagenous tissues have high mechanical robustness, the majority of the constructs made from collagen have much lower mechanical properties compared to those of native tissues. Commonly used methods for processing collagen are collagen sponges and gels, electrospinning, and wet spinning/extrusion. While each of these methods and products fabricated by these methods have their own advantages, in general, gels and sponges are mechanically very weak, electrospinning can only fabricate 1 or 2 dimensional constructs with a high chance of collagen denaturation and wet spinning/extrusion make collagen threads with partial alignment at best. We developed a method, electrochemical processing of collagen, which can process collagen solution to form mechanically robust 1, 2, and 3 dimensional constructs with enhanced the mechanical properties that match the level of native tissues without denaturation. Collagen threads and sheets fabricated by this method were used in several different skeletal tissue engineering studies, such as tendon, cartilage, and bone tissue engineering.

Results of all of these studies demonstrated the electrochemical processing of collagen to be a powerful method for processing collagen solution into mechanically robust products for use in musculoskeletal tissue engineering applications. While this study showed some data on in-vivo performance of the products fabricated via electrochemical processing, further in-vivo studies need to be performed to attain more insight into in-vivo performance of the products in specific applications like cartilage, bone, and tendon tissue engineering. Moreover, the application of electrochemically processed products is not limited to musculoskeletal tissues. While collagen is one of the most biocompatible materials and one of the elements of the extracellular matrix in many tissues, electrochemically processed products can be designed and fabricated to be used in a wide variety of tissue engineering applications than musculoskeletal applications.