Tissue engineering of various musculoskeletal or cardiovascular tissues requires scaffolds with controllable mechanical anisotropy. However, native tissues also exhibit significant inhomogeneity in their mechanical properties, and the principal axes of anisotropy may vary with site or depth from the tissue surface. Thus, techniques to produce multilayered biomaterial scaffolds with controllable...

Aligned electrospun scaffolds are promising tools for engineering fibrous musculoskeletal tissues, as they reproduce the mechanical anisotropy of these tissues and can direct ordered neo-tissue formation. However, these scaffolds suffer from a slow cellular infiltration rate, likely due in part to their dense fiber packing. We hypothesized that cell ingress could be expedited in scaffolds by in...

Electrospinning is a long-known polymer processing technique that has received more interest and attention in recent years due to its versatility and potential use in the field of biomedical research. The fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) electrospun matrices for drug delivery and tissue engineering is of particular interest. In the present study, we identified optimal conditions to generat...

The combination of different materials and capabilities to manufacture at several scales open new possibilities in scaffold design for bone regeneration. This work is focused on bimodal scaffolds that combine polylactic acid (PLA) melt extruded strands with polycaprolactone (PCL) electrospun fibers. This type of bimodal scaffold offers better mechanical properties, compared to the use of PCL fo...

This research activity was aimed at the development of dual-scale scaffolds consisting of three-dimensional constructs of aligned poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) microfilaments and electrospun poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) fibers. PCL constructs composed by layers of parallel microsized filaments (0/90° lay-down pattern), with a diameter of around 365 μm and interfilament distance of around 1...

We elucidate the effects of incorporating surfactants into electrospun poly (ɛ-caprolactone) (PCL) scaffolds on network homogeneity, cellular adherence and osteogenic differentiation. Lecithin was added with a range of concentrations to PCL solutions, which were electrospun to yield functionalized scaffolds. Addition of lecithin yielded a dose-dependent reduction in scaffold hydrophobicity, whi...

Diseases and disorders associated with nervous system such as injuries by trauma and neurodegeneration are shown to be one of the most serious problems in medicine, requiring innovative strategies to trigger and enhance the nerve regeneration. Tissue engineering aims to provide a highly biomimetic environment by using a combination of cells, materials and suitable biological cues, by which the ...

Guidance of neurite extension and establishment of neural connectivity hold great importance for neural tissue regeneration and neural conduit implants. Although bioactive-epitope functionalized synthetic or natural polymeric materials have been proposed for the induction of neural regeneration, chemical modifications of these materials for neural differentiation still remain a challenge due to...

A comparative study on the in vitro osteogenic potential of electrospun poly-L-lactide/hydroxyapatite/collagen (PLLA/HA/Col, PLLA/HA, and PLLA/Col) scaffolds was conducted. The morphology, chemical composition, and surface roughness of the fibrous scaffolds were examined. Furthermore, cell attachment, distribution, morphology, mineralization, extracellular matrix protein localization, and gene ...

Articular cartilage is prone to degeneration and possesses extremely poor self-healing capacity due to inherent low cell density and the absence of a vasculature network. Tissue engineered cartilage scaffolds show promise for cartilage repair. However, there still remains a lack of ideal biomimetic tissue scaffolds which effectively stimulate cartilage regeneration with appropriate functional p...