Abstract
This paper describes the fabrication of a structural scaffold consisting of both randomly oriented nanofibers and triangular prism patterns on the scaffold surface using a combination technique of electrospinning and collector templates. The polycaprolactone (PCL) nanofibers were electrospun over a triangular prism pattern mold, which acted as a template. The deposited scaffold was removed from the template to produce a standalone structural scaffold of three-dimensional micropatterned nanofibers. The fabricated structural scaffold was compared with flat randomly oriented nanofibers based on in vitro and in vivo studies. The in vitro study indicated that the structural scaffold demonstrated higher fibroblast cell proliferation, cell elongation with a 13.48 ± 2.73 aspect ratio and 70% fibroblast cell orientation compared with flat random nanofibers. Among the treatment groups, the structural scaffold escalated the wound closure to 92.17% on day 14. Histological staining of the healed wound area demonstrated that the structural scaffold exhibited advanced epithelization of the epidermal layer accompanied by mild inflammation. The proliferated fibroblast cells and collagen fibers in the structural scaffold appeared denser and arranged more horizontally. These results determined the potential of micropatterned scaffolds for stimulating cell behavior and their application for wound healing.
Highlights
Electrospinning is an efficient fabrication technique used to produce continuous microto nanoscale fibers from various natural and synthetic polymer solutions
Two nanofibrous scaffolds with significantly different morphologies were fabricated by modifying the collector template used for electrospinning
Known electrospinning techniques will produce randomly oriented fibers and the quantitative analysis of SEM images showed that the distribution of the fiber diameters of the 2D scaffold ranged between 100 nm to 700 nm
Summary
Electrospinning is an efficient fabrication technique used to produce continuous microto nanoscale fibers from various natural and synthetic polymer solutions. Numerous approaches have been developed to produce electrospun fibers with different structures [4,8,9,10,11,12] They can be collected as aligned oriented fibers by using modified collectors of different forms and arrangements, such as rotating drums [13], separate electrodes and metal rings [14,15], or using external electric and magnetic fields [8,16]. Inspired by the advantages of patterned electrospun nanofibers and micropatterning that could stimulate the biological response, we fabricated structural nanofibrous scaffolds to induce fibroblast cell alignment and investigated the viability of fibroblast cells. A triangular prism pattern mold as the collector template was used in this study, inspired by Razali et al.; they demonstrated that a triangular micropatterned film significantly regulated myoblast cell alignment and promoted elongation behavior [18]. The regenerating skin tissue was evaluated through histological staining analysis
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