Facilitation of Osteogenic Differentiation of hASCs on PEDOT:PSS/MXene Composite Sponge with Electrical Stimulation

Abstract

Innovations in biomedical tissue engineering are on the increase as many researchers look for ways to develop biological scaffolds for cells. Studies have shown that the application of external force and electrical stimulation (ES) promotes stem cell chondrogenic and osteogenic differentiation. Therefore, bioscaffolds sensitive to external stimuli can not only influence the cell behavior with their native physical and biochemical properties but also act as a mediator receiving an outside-in signal to alter the cellular activities under specific conditions. For the first time, the synthetic polymer poly(3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene):polystyrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) was combined with a two-dimensional, nanoconducting material, titanium carbide (MXene, Ti3C2X3), to prepare three-dimensional (3D) conductive scaffolds. Some studies have shown that MXene has good biocompatibility, osteoinductivity, and bone regeneration activity. The PEDOT:PSS/MXene scaffold was applied to the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs, and ES was used to enhance the osteogenic differentiation. The results showed that the conductive scaffold had low cytotoxicity to hASCs, which could grow and migrate in the 3D scaffold. In addition, osteogenic-specific gene expression significantly differed when the ES was applied. We propose that this PEDOT:PSS/MXene scaffold may serve as a platform for the study of osteogenic differentiation of stem cells with ES and may potentially be ex vivo fabricated as a tissue engineering construct for studying other modes of other ESs such as direct current, capacitive, or inductive coupling in a 3D environment.