Highly aligned and interconnected porous poly(ε-caprolactone) scaffolds derived from co-continuous polymer blends

Publication date: 15 August 2017
Source:Materials & Design, Volume 128
Author(s): Hua-Mo Yin, Xiang Li, Jia-Zhuang Xu, Baisong Zhao, Ji-Hua Li, Zhong-Ming Li
Constructing oriented porous architecture in the scaffolds offers the basis for mimicking the structure of highly organized tissues. In the current work, we attempted to fabricate three-dimensional (3D), oriented porous poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) scaffolds by water extracting polyethylene oxide (PEO) from the oriented PCL/PEO co-continuous blends. Solid phase extrusion was imposed to the bulk co-continuous blends so as to align both PCL and PEO phases along the extrusion direction, where coarsening of binary blends was impeded due to control over the extrusion temperature below their melting points. Thus, fully interconnected (connectivity: ~100%) aligned pores with uniform size were generated in the PCL porous scaffold after PEO extraction. Intriguingly, in vitro bone marrow stem cell staining results showed that such a porous scaffold with anisotropic structure exhibited very high ability to guide cellular alignment and elongation compared to the regular one with isotropic structure. The enabling strategy provides a versatile, scalable and tissue-friendly route to construct the 3D porous scaffolds with highly interconnected aligned pores, which is promising for the use in tissue repair.

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