Mineralised polylactide and polycaprolactone soft foams with hierarchical micro-macro porous structure for tissue engineering

Abstract

The purpose of the study was development of soft foams from resorbable polymers with unique micro-macro porous interconnected hierarchical structure specially designed as scaffold for engineering of soft tissues. The foams have been prepared by freeze-drying of solutions of polylactide (PLA) and polycaprolactone (PCL) in 1,4-dioxane. The foams prepared by freeze-drying had interconnected porous aerogel characteristics. The hierarchical structure with bimodal micro-macro pore size distribution were obtained after addition of sucrose or NaCl porogens with defined crystal size distributions to the solutions before freeze-drying and leaching the porogen crystals from the freeze-dried foams with demineralised water. Polyethyleneimine was chemically conjugated to the alkali-treated foams followed by conjugation of citric acid using carbodiimide chemistry. Finally, they were mineralised by immersing and incubating in a simulated body fluid with ionic concentration similar to that of human blood plasma, to obtain tissue engineering scaffolds. To verify their biocompatibility, the scaffolds were seeded with adipose-derived stem cells (ASC) and sarcoma osteogenic-2 (SaOs-2) human osteoblast-like cells. Morphology of the cells attached to the scaffolds was evaluated and their viability was verified by a metabolic test. Biocompatibility and usability of the scaffolds was successfully verified by incubation with adipose-derived stem cells and SaOs-2 human osteosarcoma cell line. Mineralised scaffolds are more suitable growth supports for both the cell types than unmineralized collagen scaffolds. The scaffolds have been specially designed for engineering of soft tissues, but they can be used in other categories of tissue engineering, too.