Aligned electrospun polymer fibres for skeletal muscle regeneration

Abstract

Skeletal muscle repair is often overlooked in surgical procedures and in serious burn victims. Creating a tissueengineered skeletal muscle would not only provide a grafting material for these clinical situations, but could also be used as a valuable true-to-life research tool into diseases affecting muscle tissue. Electrospinning of the elastomer PLGA produced aligned fibres that had the correct topology to provide contact guidance for myoblast elongation and alignment. In addition, the electrospun scaffold required no surface modifications or incorporation of biologic material for adhesion, elongation, and differentiation of C2C12 murine myoblasts.

Anisotropically oriented electrospun matrices with an imprinted periodic micropattern: a new scaffold for engineered muscle constructs

“…In addition, sub-micrometer topographies displaying groove sizes of 450-900 nm were found to promote myoblast alignment and fusion into longer, more regularly shaped myotubes in comparison with flat substrates. Similar to reports of substrates with grooves of various widths and depths, electrospun fibres of various polymers in the nanometre or micrometre range were reported to induce spatial myoblast orientation and fusion into multinucleated myotubes (Choi et al 2008, Riboldi et al 2008, Aviss et al 2010. Various studies led to the hypothesis that a wide range of fibre diameter (300 nm to 12 μm) can induce myoblast orientation.…”

“…Myoblasts and myotubes aligned on substrates with groove widths of 0.45-50 μm, with a minimal threshold requirement of 130 nm. An alternative strategy consists of electrospinning synthetic polymers to produce parallel-oriented nano-or micron-scaled fibres (Riboldi et al 2005, Choi et al 2008, Aviss et al 2010, Ricotti et al 2012. Additionally, we have recently shown (Guex et al 2012) that myoblasts align preferentially on parallel-oriented nano-to submicron-sized fibres of poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL), as compared to those randomly oriented.…”

Effect of poling state and morphology of piezoelectric poly(vinylidene fluoride) membranes for skeletal muscle tissue engineering

“…Cell morphology is another important characteristic in tissue engineering scaffold design as it allows the control of cell arrangement and the translational effects that cell morphology have on other cell functions 53 . Cell morphology can be 85 influenced by the surface substrate and can adopt different morphologies on fibrous membranes compared to film membranes 54 . In the case of skeletal muscle tissue engineering, the cell alignment plays a key role once this tissue in vivo consists in a highly organized structure composed by bundles of highly 90 oriented muscles fibers 55 .…”

Electrospinning of aligned fibers with adjustable orientation using auxiliary electrodes

“…Although the production of aligned fibers by the use of rotating high-speed collectors has been already reported [13][14][15], we were able to demonstrate that the narrowing of the bending instability between two auxiliary electrodes improves fiber alignment even at very low velocities (figures 6 and 7). This observation can be explained as the confinement of the bending instability not only shapes the spinning area but also results in a single fiber's velocity vector with a considerably reduced component in the direction perpendicular to the electrodes.…”

“…Many techniques have been developed to control fiber orientation and obtain aligned fibers [11,12]. Some methods involve the modification of the target to yield aligned fibers, for example, by use of a rotating mandrel [13][14][15]. By varying the surface speed of the collector the degree of alignment can be somewhat adjusted.…”