Dynamic mechanical analysis of agarose-based biopolymers with potential use in regenerative medicine

Abstract

Regenerative medicine is used for tissue healing, replace missing organs and tissues which are affected by aging, disease, or trauma both structurally and functionally. Materials are the key component of regenerative medicine approaches because the material can imitate the native extracellular matrix of those tissues and improve both the physical behavior and the properties of new tissue. However, most of the available materials used for that purpose fail to provide adequate mechanical properties to replicate the behavior of the original tissue. Thus, most of these applications are still far from being enduring. This project aims to determine the multi-scale mechanical properties of some biopolymers with potential use in regenerative medicine. In this very first part, Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) was performed using shear mode on different type VII agarose-based biopolymers at room temperature during 10 min cycles at 1 Hz frequency. On one hand, samples of fibrine-agarose were tested, and on the other, different compositions of chitosan-agarose, while pure type VII agarose was used as control. Computed values for the storage and loss modulus and the small values for Tan delta ratio (tan δ) show that all materials become elastic, and they have a good capacity to dissipate energy per cycle of deformation. This fact means that all materials are suitable for being used as a scaffold for cell culture, a possible material for bioprinting applications and they could have potential use in regenerative medicine.