New textile technology to produce biological scaffolds with higher efficiency

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, April 8 (Reporter Chang Lijun) One of the major challenges facing tissue engineering at present is how to mass produce scaffold materials to meet the needs of clinical patients. According to the latest news from the University of Missouri, the school collaborated with researchers at North Carolina State University to discover that three new textile technologies can be used to produce tissue engineering scaffolds that can be mass produced and more cost effective.

Tissue engineering is a process in which stem cells are "planted" in biological materials to grow and replace defective tissue. This requires special materials to make the scaffold to support the stem cells, and eventually the scaffold will decompose, leaving only the natural tissue. These tissues can help patients with cartilage, bone, and breast tissue to be damaged by diabetes, circulatory disorders, and the like.

Tissue engineering scaffolds are usually made of fiber. In the past, electrospinning technology was used to combine non-woven fibers through an electrostatic field to create a stent for stem cell attachment, but this method is not economical to produce on a large scale.

Elizabeth Robova, dean of the University of Missouri's School of Engineering, said that the fibers produced by electrospinning are relatively fragile, the stents are inconsistent and the pores are too small, so they want to test some methods to standardize the process, with the goal of expanding production scale. And to ensure that the material looks the same, the same properties, can be used for clinical design.

The research team examined the production of textiles such as clothes and curtain fabrics and tested three new textile methods – meltblown, spunbond and carding – to produce polylactic acid (PLA) stents. Polylactic acid has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use as a collagen filler and for the cultivation of human stem cells. Then they spent three weeks researching whether stem cells can stay healthy and whether they can begin to differentiate into fat and bone cells. It turns out that all three textile methods are feasible.

Robova said that these alternatives are more cost-effective than electrospinning, with a small sample cost of 2 to 5 dollars for an electrospun material, and a manufacturing cost of only 0.3 to 3 dollars using these three technologies, more efficient. economic. The team's next step is to test the performance of the stents produced by these three methods in animals.