Incorporation of Elastin to Improve Polycaprolactone-Based Scaffolds for Skeletal Muscle via Electrospinning.

Victor Perez-Puyana,Mercedes Jiménez-Rosado,Fernando De La Portilla,Alberto Romero,Paula Villanueva

doi:10.3390/polym13091501

Abstract

Skeletal muscle regeneration is increasingly necessary, which is reflected in the increasing number of studies that are focused on improving the scaffolds used for such regeneration, as well as the incubation protocol. The main objective of this work was to improve the characteristics of polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffolds by incorporating elastin to achieve better cell proliferation and biocompatibility. In addition, two cell incubation protocols (with and without dynamic mechanical stimulation) were evaluated to improve the activity and functionality yields of the regenerated cells. The results indicate that the incorporation of elastin generates aligned and more hydrophilic scaffolds with smaller fiber size. In addition, the mechanical properties of the resulting scaffolds make them adequate for use in both bioreactors and patients. All these characteristics increase the biocompatibility of these systems, generating a better interconnection with the tissue. However, due to the low maturation achieved in biological tests, no differences could be found between the incubation with and without dynamic mechanical stimulation.

Highlights

Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering have grown exponentially in the number of publications, with the latter being one of the advances in biomedicine with greater impact [1,2]
The failure of these techniques is usually due to the fact that the muscle cells are incubated ex vivo in a static manner, without undergoing the mechanical stimulation to which they are accustomed within the human body
On the last day of culture, viability growth was observed for the static controls, while in the dynamic scaffolds the viability continued to decrease. These results suggest that cells may have detached from the dynamic scaffold during their culture in the bioreactor to a greater extent compared to the static controls, due to the continuous tension and contraction movements, which may influence the feasibility results

Summary

Introduction

Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering have grown exponentially in the number of publications, with the latter being one of the advances in biomedicine with greater impact [1,2]. The techniques proposed to date are limited, since they not allow restoring the full functionality of the replaced muscle [8] The failure of these techniques is usually due to the fact that the muscle cells are incubated ex vivo in a static manner, without undergoing the mechanical stimulation to which they are accustomed within the human body. New protocols are being investigated, where muscle cells are dynamically stimulated during their incubation, improving their proliferation and differentiation This is achieved using bioreactors that subject the cells to mechanical stimulation, recreating the conditions of muscle tissue in vivo [10,11]. Scaffolds must have the mechanical properties requested by the bioreactor, in addition to morphological properties suitable for the interconnection and proliferation of cells [13]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion