Advantages of Additive Manufacturing for Biomedical Applications of Polyhydroxyalkanoates

Abstract

In recent years, biopolymers have been attracting the attention of researchers and specialists from different fields, including biotechnology, material science, engineering, and medicine. The reason is the possibility of combining sustainability with scientific and technological progress. This is an extremely broad research topic, and a distinction has to be made among different classes and types of biopolymers. Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) is a particular family of polyesters, synthetized by microorganisms under unbalanced growth conditions, making them both bio-based and biodegradable polymers with a thermoplastic behavior. Recently, PHAs were used more intensively in biomedical applications because of their tunable mechanical properties, cytocompatibility, adhesion for cells, and controllable biodegradability. Similarly, the 3D-printing technologies show increasing potential in this particular field of application, due to their advantages in tailor-made design, rapid prototyping, and manufacturing of complex structures. In this review, first, the synthesis and the production of PHAs are described, and different production techniques of medical implants are compared. Then, an overview is given on the most recent and relevant medical applications of PHA for drug delivery, vessel stenting, and tissue engineering. A special focus is reserved for the innovations brought by the introduction of additive manufacturing in this field, as compared to the traditional techniques. All of these advances are expected to have important scientific and commercial applications in the near future.

Isolation, Phylogenetic and Gephyromycin Metabolites Characterization of New Exopolysaccharides-Bearing Antarctic Actinobacterium from Feces of Emperor Penguin

“…Furthermore, genomic mining of strain NJES-13 revealed one loci harboring genes assigned to PHA biosynthesis pathway. Bacterial PHAs are used to store carbon and energy, and highlight the huge talent for the production of biodegradable bioplastics [ 37 , 38 ]. These encoding genes included acetoacetyl-CoA reductase, poly(R)- hydroxyalcanoic acid synthase and an ORF-encoding phasin protein responsible for PHA granule formation.…”

Characterization of biocompatible scaffolds manufactured by fused filament fabrication of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate- co -3-hydroxyhexanoate)

“…Early investigations of biomedical applications of PHA addressed simple systems obtained by traditional manufacturing methods, such as solvent casting [ 11 ], salt leaching [ 12 ], thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) [ 13 ], emulsification [ 14 ] and electrospinning [ 15 ]. All these approaches suffer from the limitation of exerting little control over the structure development and operate at scales above a few hundreds of microns, which is clearly insufficient for extensive use in the biomedical field [ 16 ]. Besides, they require large amounts of harmful solvents, e.g., chloroform or dichloromethane.…”

Review of Hybrid Materials Based on Polyhydroxyalkanoates for Tissue Engineering Applications

“…To overcome these disadvantages and improve PHA properties and make it more suitable for biomedical applications, many hybrid PHA-based composites have been investigated [ 28 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]. Several reviews have been published describing production, properties, biocompatibility, and potential applications of pure PHAs [ 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]. Unfortunately, there is a lack of systematic and thorough overview addressing the performance of PHA hybrid materials for tissue engineering and biomedical applications.…”