Recent studies have shown that 3D printing has a significant potential to respond to the need for structural complexity in biomaterial design. However, the currently printed devices only serve as a structural support, they permit but don’t promote biological function, due to lack of the bioactivity of the available polymers (including poly(lactic acid) (PLA), and polycaprolactone (PCL)). In this study, our goal is to develop a novel biodegradable polymer family, for fused deposition modeling (FDM) and solvent-based printing, with user controlled functionalizability (post- or pre-printing) to develop bioactive scaffolds for tissue engineering applications.<br/><br/>In this study, poly(4-hydroxyphenethyl 2-(4-hydroxyphenyl) acetate) (PHTy), and poly(4-hydroxyphenethyl 3-(4-hydroxyphenyl)propanoate) (PDTy) were developed due to their semicrystalline properties for FDM and excellent solubility in low boiling point water-miscible solvents for solvent-based printing. For FDM, the melt-to-solid transition properties were further enhanced by incorporation of 2,2’-(1,4-phenylene)diacetic acid (PDA) into the polymer design forming copolymers of p(HTy-PDA) and p(DTy-PDA). To enable functionalizability of the polymers, glutamic acid (Glu) was incorporated into the polymer design (using carbodiimide reaction) without altering the melt rheological properties (including the viscosity). The amine group in Glu was used to incorporate a wide range of reactive groups (R) via carbodiimide chemistry (Fig 1A). This step can be performed prior- (bulk chemistry) or post-printing (surface chemistry). These reactive groups can further be used to incorporate biochemical cues. The reactivity with photo-chemistry enabled molecules (alkene and alkyne) and molecules with high affinity interactions (biotin-streptavidin) were confirmed using fluorescently labeled molecules (Fig.1 E-H).<br/><br/>A novel family of tyrosol-based polyesters was developed for FDM and solvent-based printing. The printability and functionalizability was tuned using chemistry. This novel polymer family is a potential candidate system to fabricate 3D scaffolds with user-defined and tunable biactivity.

Tunable scaffolds from novel, 3D-printable biomaterials

251st National Meeting (2016)

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