FABRICATION OF 3D SCAFFOLDS VIA E-JET PRINTING FOR TENDON TISSUE REPAIR

摘要

Current clinical grafts used in tendon treatment are subject to several restrictions and there is a significant demand for alternative engineered tissue. The previously reported tendon scaffolds mainly based on electro-spinning and textile technologies showed promising results for tendon regeneration. However, limitations, such as small pore size, nutrition transmission, cell attachment, exist universally in such scaffolds. In this work, a novel tissue engineered polycaprolactone (PCL) tendon scaffold based on electrohydrodynamic jet printing (E-Jetting) was developed for investigation. In preliminary in-vitro study, human tenocytes were seeded in scaffolds with pore size of ～106 μm to investigate the cell attachment, morphology and alignment. This study suggested that E-jetted tendon scaffold highly mimicked hierarchical construction from fiber to fascicle level of the native tendon, and has potential to be an alternative tendon regeneration tool.