Abstract: Efficient cell vehicles for cell culture and delivery play an important role in stem cell-based tissue regeneration. In recent years, as a new stem cell culture and delivery vehicles, cell-laden microspheres have attracted great attention among researchers due to their multiple advantages, including small size and large specific surface area, injectability, capacity to provide 3D growth environment for cells, integrated ability for both in vitro expanding and in vivo transplantation. For dental pulp regeneration, the root canal system is narrow and irregular, and the reconstruction of the vascular system in it is rather difficult, so the cell-laden microspheres with injectability and rapid mass diffusion became the ideal choice. What’s more, cell-laden microspheres can be optimized through material design to solve the bottleneck issues in pulp regeneration research, including enhancing the odontontic differentiation of the stem cells, or promoting the reconstruction and regeneration of vascular system in the root canal. At present, there is no Chinese review article that summarizes this topic. This paper aims to briefly introduce the properties and characteristics of the cell-laden microspheres, mainly to summarize the research progess in dental pulp regeneration fields, and make some prospects of the future research direction.

Key words: Cell-laden microspheres, endodontic regeneration, hydrogel microcapsules, in vitro culture, tissue engineering.