Abstract
Medical applications stimulate the need for materials with broad potential. Chitosan, the partially deacetylated derivative of chitin, offers many interesting characteristics, such as biocompatibility and chemical derivatization possibility. In the present study, porous scaffolds composed of electrospun interwoven nanometric fibers are produced using chitosan or chitosan functionalized with aliphatic chains of twelve, fourteen or sixteen methylene groups. The scaffolds were thoroughly characterized by SEM and XPS. The length of the aliphatic tail influenced the physico-chemical and dynamic mechanical properties of the functionalized chitosan. The electrospun membranes revealed no interaction of Gram+ or Gram− bacteria, resulting in neither antibacterial nor bactericidal, but constitutively sterile. The electrospun scaffolds demonstrated the absence of cytotoxicity, inflammation response, and eryptosis. These results open the door to their application for blood purification devices, hemodialysis membranes, and vascular grafts.
Highlights
Blood-contacting medical devices, such as vascular catheters, hemodialysis filters, hemopurifiers, blood vessel substitutes, vascular grafts, stents, and heart valves, are routinely used in healthcare settings [1,2]
As far as the addition of 10% PEO does not cause any significant modification of contact angle values, we argue that PEO does not segregate at the film surface: it is hidden near the surface by a layer of chitosan, according to the softening recorded by the experimental curves
atomic force microscopy (AFM) analyses performed on films of pristine or PEO-added materials demonstrated that both the addition of PEO and the functionalization with hydrophobic tails dramatically change the properties of chitosan
Summary
Blood-contacting medical devices, such as vascular catheters, hemodialysis filters, hemopurifiers, blood vessel substitutes, vascular grafts, stents, and heart valves, are routinely used in healthcare settings [1,2]. Such devices should be biocompatible, hemocompatible, and resistant to surface-initiated blood coagulation processes and adverse immune reactions [3]. The gold standard for blood-contacting materials is Dacron or Teflon Both synthetic and natural materials have been recently investigated in an attempt to reduce protein and cell adsorption usually favored by electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions between the adsorbed protein and the artificial surface: these materials include poly(ethylene oxide), pyrolytic carbon, albumin, phosphorylcholine, and elastin-inspired. Chitosan derives from the partial deacetylation of chitin, a natural biopolymer [5], and it is considered a biologically renewable, biodegradable, biocompatible and nonantigenic [6].deacetylation
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