Tissue engineering is a rapidly evolving, multidisciplinary field that aims at generating or regenerating 3D functional tissues for in vitro disease modeling and drug screening applications or for in vivo therapies. A variety of advanced biological and engineering methods are increasingly being used to further enhance and customize the functionality of tissue engineered scaffolds. To this end, tunable drug delivery and release mechanisms are incorporated into tissue engineering modalities to promote different therapeutic processes, thus, addressing challenges faced in the clinical applications. In this review, we elaborate the mechanisms and recent developments in different drug delivery vehicles, including the quantum dots, nano/micro particles, and molecular agents. Different loading strategies to incorporate the therapeutic reagents into the scaffolding structures are explored. Further, we discuss the main mechanisms to tune and monitor/quantify the release kinetics of embedded drugs from engineered scaffolds. We also survey the current trend of drug delivery using stimuli driven biopolymer scaffolds to enable precise spatiotemporal control of the release behavior. Recent advancements, challenges facing current scaffold-based drug delivery approaches, and areas of future research are discussed.

组织工程是一个快速发展的多学科领域，旨在为体外疾病建模和药物筛选应用或体内生成或再生 3D 功能组织疗法。各种先进的生物和工程方法越来越多地用于进一步增强和定制组织工程支架的功能。为此，将可调药物递送和释放机制纳入组织工程模式以促进不同的治疗过程，从而解决临床应用中面临的挑战。在这篇综述中，我们详细阐述了不同药物递送载体的机制和最新进展，包括量子点、纳米/微粒和分子试剂。探索了将治疗试剂结合到支架结构中的不同加载策略。此外，我们讨论了调整和监测/量化工程支架中嵌入药物的释放动力学的主要机制。我们还调查了使用刺激驱动的生物聚合物支架的药物递送的当前趋势，以实现对释放行为的精确时空控制。讨论了最近的进展、当前基于支架的药物递送方法面临的挑战以及未来的研究领域。