Abstract
Recent advances in three-dimensional printing technology enable facile and on-demand fabrication of patient-specific bone scaffolds. However, there is still an urgent need for printable biomaterials with osteoinductivity. In the present study, we propose an approach to synthesize fibroblast growth factor-2 loaded-mesoporous calcium silicate nanoparticles. The growth factor loaded-nanoparticles served as fillers of polycaprolactone and then the composite scaffolds with a controlled pore structure were obtained through a fused deposition modeling technique. To evaluate the feasibility of the composite scaffolds in bone tissue engineering, drug release kinetic, bioactivity, cell proliferation, differentiation, and animal study were conducted. Our findings illustrate that utilization of mesoporous calcium silicate allowed the introduction of fibroblast growth factor-2 into the composite scaffolds through a simple soaking process and then gradually released from the scaffold to facilitate proliferation and osteogenesis differentiation of human Wharton’s jelly mesenchymal stem cells. Additionally, the in vivo femur defect experiments also indicate that the co-existence of calcium silicate and fibrous growth factor-2 synergistically accelerated new bone formation. These results demonstrate that the fibroblast growth factor-2-loaded mesoporous calcium silicate nanoparticles/polycaprolactone composite scaffolds may serve as potential bone grafts for facilitating repair of defected bone tissues.
Highlights
Repairing critical bone defects always requires the use of implants, such as autologous bone, the allogeneic bone graft, or artificial, metal and ceramic substitutes in clinical settings [1,2,3]
It can be observed that mesoporous nanoparticles (MCS) with a size of 229.8 ± 34.9 nm exhibited an ordered interior mesoporous structure with a pore size of 2.3 ± 0.4 nm, which was in accordance with previous results [27,30]
Our results indicate that the up-regulatory effect of FGF-2 on FGFR expression was in a dose-dependent manner
Summary
Repairing critical bone defects always requires the use of implants, such as autologous bone, the allogeneic bone graft, or artificial, metal and ceramic substitutes in clinical settings [1,2,3]. Accumulating research in the realm of tissue engineering has delivered a wide spectrum of manufacturing approaches used to fabricate artificial bone grafts in the form of open-porous scaffolds by using degradable biomaterials [6,7]. To accommodate the clinical requirements of 3D printed-bone scaffolds, thermoplastic polyesters have shown their applicability in bone tissue engineering due to their degradability, bioresorbability, biocompatibility, as well as printability [9]. The hydrophobic nature of PCL can impair effective cell-material interactions and hydrolysis, which results in poor healing efficiency and extremely slow degradation rate, impeding successful implementation in bone tissue engineering [12,13]
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