Design of a novel electrospinning setup for the fabrication of biomimetic scaffolds for meniscus tissue engineering applications

Abstract

The tissue engineering field has provided great efforts towards the development of potential treatments for meniscal injuries. The success of these strategies are linked to the creation of scaffolds that are able to mimic the extracellular matrix architecture of the native meniscus. However, most conventional electrospinning setups can only produce either 2D aligned fibrous structures or 3D fibrous scaffolds with fibers randomly distributed. Herein, we designed a novel electrospinning setup, which consisted of two metallic devices as collectors: an external cylindrical hollow piece with a central pin and a mobile internal hollow cylinder. A feasible approach to create single-layer scaffolds with both circumferentially and radially aligned ultrathin fibers was developed. Then, this investigation demonstrated a great potential for the application of these scaffolds towards meniscus tissue engineering, once they are able to reproduce the orientation of the main collagen fibers present in the extracellular matrix of the knee meniscus.