Sant Shilpa, Khademhosseini Ali
Harvard Medical School, USA.
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2010;2010:3546-8. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2010.5627486.
Development of biodegradable tough elastomeric scaffolds are important for engineering tissues such as myocardium and heart valves that experience dynamic environments in vivo. Biomaterial scaffolds should ideally provide appropriate physical, chemical and mechanical cues to the seeded cells to closely mimic the native ECM. Collagen fibers form an important component of native myocardium as well as heart valve leaflets and provide necessary tensile properties to these tissues. Amongst various polymers, collagen mimicking biodegradable elastomer, Poly-(glycerol-sebacate) (PGS) has shown great promise in microfabricated scaffolds for cardiac tissue engineering. However, its use is limited by its solubility and the ability to cast nano-/microfibrous structures. For its superior mechanical properties, thermal or UV crosslinking of the pre-polymer is required under high temperatures and vacuum limiting fabrication of fibers. In this work, we fabricated electrospun PGS fibers were fabricated by simply blending it with biodegradable polycaprolactone (PCL) polymer without any post-processing. It was hypothesized that microfibrous PGS-PCL scaffolds would provide appropriate physical (fibrous structure) and chemical (balanced hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity) to the cells in addition to the mechanical properties.
可生物降解的坚韧弹性体支架的开发对于工程化诸如心肌和心脏瓣膜等在体内经历动态环境的组织非常重要。理想情况下，生物材料支架应向接种的细胞提供适当的物理、化学和机械信号，以紧密模拟天然细胞外基质。胶原纤维是天然心肌以及心脏瓣膜小叶的重要组成部分，并为这些组织提供必要的拉伸性能。在各种聚合物中，模仿胶原蛋白的可生物降解弹性体聚（甘油 - 癸二酸酯）（PGS）在用于心脏组织工程的微制造支架中显示出巨大的潜力。然而，其应用受到其溶解性以及铸造纳米/微纤维结构能力的限制。由于其优异的机械性能，需要在高温和真空条件下对预聚物进行热交联或紫外线交联，这限制了纤维的制造。在这项工作中，我们通过简单地将其与可生物降解的聚己内酯（PCL）聚合物混合而无需任何后处理来制造电纺PGS纤维。据推测，微纤维PGS - PCL支架除了机械性能外，还将为细胞提供适当的物理（纤维结构）和化学（平衡的亲水性和疏水性）。
