Abstract
Corneal diseases are the main reason of vision loss globally. Constructing a corneal equivalent which has a similar strength and transparency with the native cornea, seems to be a feasible way to solve the shortage of donated cornea. Electrospun collagen scaffolds are often fabricated and used as a tissue-engineered cornea, but the main drawback of poor mechanical properties make it unable to meet the requirement for surgery suture, which limits its clinical applications to a large extent. Aligned polyvinyl acetate (PVA)/collagen (PVA-COL) scaffolds were electrospun by mixing collagen and PVA to reinforce the mechanical strength of the collagen electrospun scaffold. Human keratocytes (HKs) and human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs) inoculated on aligned and random PVA-COL electrospun scaffolds adhered and proliferated well, and the aligned nanofibers induced orderly HK growth, indicating that the designed PVA-COL composite nanofibrous electrospun scaffold is suitable for application in tissue-engineered cornea.
Highlights
Cornea is the transparent part of the ocular surface; its main function is to form a barrier to protect the intraocular structure and environment, and refract light onto the retina [1,2,3]
From the SEM images and the histogram of the diameter range, we found that the fibers of pure collagen and pure polyvinyl acetate (PVA) were more uniform than the PVA-COL composite nanofibers, and this may because the hybrid of collagen and PVA makes the mixture not as homogeneous as the pure one
The aligned PVA-COL nanofibers were smaller and more homogeneous than the random ones, which was in accordance with previous research results [34,35]
Summary
Cornea is the transparent part of the ocular surface; its main function is to form a barrier to protect the intraocular structure and environment, and refract light onto the retina [1,2,3]. Other approaches have been developed due to the limitations of fresh corneal tissue, including fully artificial keratoprostheses, animal or human sources decellularized tissue, the amniotic membrane, and non-cellularized crosslinked collagen as corneal equivalents [2]. None of these has achieved high success and permission of tissue transplantation, even though some approaches are in current practice. Another approach is the use of fully engineered cornea with superior biocompatibility and high biological performance, such as a hydrogel system or a nanofibrous or microporous scaffold [8,9,10]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
