**1. Introduction**

Acrylics are currently used in many important fields of the biomedical industry such as corneal prosthesis, intraocular lenses and contact lenses in ophthalmology [1], bone cements for orthopedic applications [2], tissue engineering [3], etc. due to their excellent properties such as biocompatibility and suitable mechanical performance, among others [4]. Many of these acrylic

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

products for various applications have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are expected to produce massively. However, many of their potential uses required for many biomedical applications are sometimes hindered by their low mechanical strength, biological interactions, electrical and/or thermal properties, water sorption and diffusion, antibacterial activity, porosity, etc. when they are synthesized as scaffolds for tissue engineering applications. Thus, new advanced acrylic-based materials have been developed and are currently under intensive research to solve all these problems by means of multicomponent polymeric systems or by combination with other materials and/or nanomaterials to form composites or nanocomposites with or without interconnected porous morphology.
