Abstract
Critical size bone defects are regularly treated by auto- and allograft transplantation. However, such treatments require to harvest bone from patient donor sites, with often limited tissue availability or risk of donor site morbidity. Not requiring bone donation, three-dimensionally (3D) printed implants and biomaterial-based tissue engineering (TE) strategies promise to be the next generation therapies for bone regeneration. We present here polylactic acid (PLA)-bioactive glass (BG) composite scaffolds manufactured by fused deposition modeling (FDM), involving the fabrication of PLA-BG composite filaments which are used to 3D print controlled open-porous and osteoinductive scaffolds. We demonstrated the printability of PLA-BG filaments as well as the bioactivity and cytocompatibility of PLA-BG scaffolds using pre-osteoblast MC3T3E1 cells. Gene expression analyses indicated the beneficial impact of BG inclusions in FDM scaffolds regarding osteoinduction, as BG inclusions lead to increased osteogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem cells in comparison to pristine PLA. Our findings confirm that FDM is a convenient additive manufacturing technology to develop PLA-BG composite scaffolds suitable for bone tissue engineering.
Highlights
Bone is known for its self-healing abilities (Bose et al, 2013)
Scanning electron microscopy micrographs indicated a homogenous distribution of bioactive glass (BG) particles (d50 = 4 ± 1 μm) inside polylactic acid (PLA)-BG filaments (Figure 1C)
Melts of PLABG mixtures were extruded from the extruder and monitored live over time to assess the time point after which the goal filament diameter of d = 2.85 mm was achieved for each PLABG composition
Summary
Bone is known for its self-healing abilities (Bose et al, 2013). The healing of bone fractures is a remarkable repairing process, resulting in the complete reconstruction of the tissue achieving its original form and functionality (Kumar and Narayan, 2014). Among others, fused deposition modeling promises to be a solventfree 3D printing approach with the potential to create patientspecific polymer-based biomaterial scaffolds (Hutmacher, 2000; Bose et al, 2013). The characterization of PLA-BG composite filaments for 3D printing, the reproducible fabrication of porous scaffolds and the assessment of the scaffold mechanical properties, cytocompatibility and osteoinductivity remain to be addressed to prove PLA-BG scaffold applicability for bone engineering. The aim of this study was to fabricate filaments for high throughput FDM of polymer-BG composite scaffolds with bioactive, cytocompatible, and osteoinductive properties. The composite filaments were used for the FDM of porous scaffolds with bioactive and osteoinductive properties. 3D printed scaffolds were studied regarding their physicochemical properties as well as cytocompatibility and osteoinductivity using MC 3T3-E1 cells and human ASC
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