Polycaprolactone scaffold fabricated via selective laser sintering for cardiac tissue engineering

Abstract

Cardiac tissue engineering has been emerged as one of the promising area in the biomedical engineering to repair or replace damaged tissue. It focused on growing cells by using temporary three – dimensional biomaterial scaffold acting as a support to guide cell proliferation. An advanced scaffold fabrication technique such as Rapid Prototyping (RP) processed has been utilized to overcome the limitation of the conventional base method. Selective Laser Sintering was utilized to fabricate tissue engineering scaffolds due to its high reproducibility and good control of pore size. Polycaprolactone (PCL) is a semicrystalline polymer that has been proven as a biocompatible and bioresorbable material for tissue engineering applications. In this report, it is aimed to show that by varying the sintering parameter of the SLS system, mechanical properties in the tensile mode of the PCL scaffold can be changed to obtain low stiffness. The SLS parameters named laser power, laser scan speed and part bed temperature were varied. The laser power between 1 – 5 W, the laser scan speed between 100 – 300 inch/s and constant part bed temperature of 50 °C were tested. The Young’s modulus of PCL scaffold varied from 3 MPa to 42 MPa and the maximum elongation varied from 12 % to 162 %. Fracture surface of the scaffold after break was also investigated to know the failure mode and avoid catastrophic failure. Although it was shown that SLS is feasible to fabricate PCL scaffold, the mechanical properties has not reached the target in order of tens kPa. Thus, further process need to be carried out to fabricate the scaffold that match with the tensile stiffness of the native myocardium.