Electrospinning a small diameter tubular scaffold for tissue engineering blood vessels

Abstract

Biodegradable scaffolds for tissue engineering have been around for some years. However, none has been successful in engineering viable autologous blood vessels which have inner diameter less than 5mm and wall thickness of 100m. In this report, a tubular scaffold was fabricated using the electrospinning technique with a variety of parameters (weight percentage of polymer, voltage, flow rate, distance between needle tip to collector and speed of rotation of collector) to reach the dimensions of a small blood vessel. The biodegradable material used was Poly (L-lactide/ε-caprolactone) (PLC). In order to determine the optimal combination of these conditions, the scaffold was subjected to characterisation techniques such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA), Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Tensile Test. In this study, tubular scaffolds with very thin wall thickness of 42 micrometers were successfully made, with such tubes having tensile strength of 9.7MPa. The characterisation techniques also showed that PLC retained its thermal and chemical properties after electrospinning.