Abstract
Vascularization for tissue engineering applications has been challenging over the past decades. Numerous efforts have been made to fabricate artificial arteries and veins, while few focused on capillary vascularization. In this paper, core-sheath electrospinning was adopted to fabricate nanoporous microtubes that mimic the native capillaries. The results showed that both solution viscosity and polyethylene oxide (PEO) ratio in polycaprolactone (PCL) sheath solution had significant effects on microtube diameter. Adding PEO into PCL sheath solution is also beneficial to surface pore formation, although the effects of further increasing PEO showed mixed results in different viscosity groups. Our study showed that the high viscosity group with a PCL/PEO ratio of 3:1 resulted in the highest average microtube diameter (2.14 µm) and pore size (250 nm), which mimics the native human capillary size of 1–10 µm. Therefore, our microtubes show high potential in tissue vascularization of engineered scaffolds.
Highlights
Tissue engineering is a multi-disciplinary field that aims at repairing tissues and organs to restore, maintain, and improve biological functions [1,2,3]
The results showed that both solution viscosities and PCL/polyethylene oxide (PEO) ratio in the sheath solution have significant effects on microtube diameter and pore size, some of the effects were non-linear
This study investigated the effects of solution viscosity and composition in core-sheath electrospinning of nanoporous PCL microtubes
Summary
Tissue engineering is a multi-disciplinary field that aims at repairing tissues and organs to restore, maintain, and improve biological functions [1,2,3]. One of the most important factors in tissue engineering is the fabrication of biomimetic scaffolds where various advanced manufacturing techniques were applied [4]. The lack of capillary vascularization has limited cell proliferation and infiltration in the scaffolds. To overcome this limitation, we adopted a novel core-sheath electrospinning technique to produce nanoporous microtubes that highly assembles native human capillaries. It takes advantage of various materials to fabricate fibers with desired properties. Parameters such as voltage and pump rate can be altered to obtain desired experimental results. Electrospinning techniques were applied in many areas, such as wound dressing [10], drug delivery [11], and biomanufacturing [12]
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