Fabrication of Small-Diameter Tubular Grafts for Vascular Tissue Engineering Applications Using Mulberry and Non-mulberry Silk Proteins.

Abstract

Silk fibroin (SF) is a natural well-known biomaterial that has widely been explored for various tissue engineering applications with great success. Herein, we describe the methodology for fabricating two different types of tubular silk scaffolds aimed for vascular grafting. The first method emphasizes the use of very thin (10-15μm) silk films with unidirectional longitudinal micro-patterns, followed by their sequential rolling, which results in a multilayered tubular graft mimicking native-like cellular composition. The second method describes the fabrication of a bi-layered tubular scaffold comprising of a highly porous inner layer covered with an outer nanofibrous electrospun layer.