Scaffold Fabrication with Biodegradable Poly(propylene fumarate) Using Microstereolithography

Abstract

Although tissue engineering is an area with great potential, it still has few applications due to the lack of biocompatible, biodegradable materials with suitable mechanical properties. Recently, several biodegradable materials were developed, of which poly(propylene fumarate (PPF) is one of the most notable. It degrades into fumaric acid and propylene glycol, which are both biocompatible products. Microstereolithography is a new technology that can be used to fabricate free-form 3-D microstructures by dividing a desired shape into many slices of a given horizontal thickness. This technology requires a low-viscosity resin to fabricate fine structures. However, the viscosity of PPF is too high to fabricate 3D structures using microstereolithography. Therefore, we reduced the viscosity of the resin by adding diethyl fumarate (DEF). Then, we added a photoinitiator to photo-crosslink the DEF/PPF resin, and fabricated 2.5-D scaffolds using our system. We confirmed that microstereolithography technology is effective in scaffold fabrication. The fabricated 2.5-D scaffolds were seeded with fibroblasts and the cells attached well after seeding.