Natural and Synthetic Intelligent Self-healing and Adaptive Materials for Medical and Engineering Applications

During the last two decades, self-healing materials have been attracting increasing interest in both engineering and medical applications. Numerous attempts have been presented focusing on the development of different self-healing systems in both natural and synthetic materials with several new production and synthesis methods and self-repair mechanisms. The current review aims to present some of the most important natural self-healing materials and systems from human hard tissues to marine structures and animal tissue and organ regeneration that can heal or regrow their tissues and parts of their bodies. These are presented in different sections, which include, hard tissue generation and fracture repair, animal tissue generation and organ repair, marine structures, self-repairing coatings for metallic alloys, concrete, hydrogels and polymers just to show the different approaches in this new and fascinating field of self-repair mechanism. Emphasis is given on the areas of tissue engineering, drug delivery, medical materials and devices and implant applications.