Polymers such as poly(lactide) (PLA) and other polyesters possess advantageous properties such as biodegradability, biocompatibility and good mechanical properties which has led to their use as scaffold materials for tissue engineering applications. Scaffolds serve as a temporary artificial extracellular matrix (ECM), thus polymers functioning as scaffolds should be reasonably hydrophilic and aid cell adhesion, proliferation, differentiation, and new tissue formation. PLA homopolymers are inherently hydrophobic and modification procedures to render them more hydrophilic generally result in the breakdown of the polymer backbone and in a decrease in the mechanical integrity of the scaffold. Furthermore, it has been a challenge to functionalize PLA-based scaffolds since control over the loading of bioactive agents is rather limited. We thus report the development of amphiphilic PLA-based block copolymers such as poly(lactide)-block-poly(polyethylene glycol ethyl ether methacrylate) (PLA-b-PPEGEEMA) which can be transformed into core-shell type fiber scaffolds using electrospinning and phase separation techniques. Contact angle and wetting studies show that the block copolymer scaffolds exhibit highly improved hydrophilicity, suggesting that the PPEGEEMA block is located on the surface of the fibers. Furthermore, preliminary cell studies using IMR90 cells show that the PLA-b-PPEGEEMA scaffolds favor cell adhesion compared to the PLA homopolymer scaffolds. Lastly, the incorporation of poly(N-methacryloxysuccinimide) (PmNAOS) allows for biofunctionalization of the block copolymer with peptides or growth factors and the synthesis of novel biocompatible, biodegradable and biofunctional polymer scaffolds is currently under way.

Novel biodegradable, biocompatible and biofunctional block copolymer scaffolds for tissue engineering applications

249th National Meeting (2015)

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