Jacquard weaving technology reimagined to manufacture bio-memetic three dimensional scaffolds for tissue regeneration, creating a textile trachea

摘要

Creating anatomically correct and physiologically compliant 3D structures is a major challenge in tissue engineering. Current technologies; including electrospinning, 3D printing, lithography, molding and use of decellurarized tissue, suffer from significant limitations specific to each technique. Contrastingly, textile forming machines can be programmed to build organized filament matrixes that are flexible, scalable and reproducible. The objective of this development is to use 3-Dimensional textile forming methods to create biomimetic scaffolds for regenerative medicine. For the purpose of this study, a trachea was chosen to demonstrate the ability to form geometrically challenging architectures. To create these textile structures, A narrow shuttle loom with Jacquard harnesses was chosen for optimal flexibility in programming. Materials used to construct the trachea were a 1/45 PGA yam and a 250micron PGA monofilament. The trachea was reduced to an idealized technical drawing to be used as a template for the textile construction. The Trachea was drafted as zones of cartilage and soft tissue that would be woven into a tubular form.Using these templates, a program for the weaving profile were compiled to build the 3-D units, interlacing weft yarns specifically into the warp sheet in such a way as to build layers of depth. The challenge with the trachea is the cartilaginous region of the lumen, creating alternating rings of hard and soft tissue. It was considered that the cartilaginous rings are discontinuous around the circumference of the lumen, so programming code was added to place the monofilament 2/3 or the way around the lumen to mimic the anatomy. After weaving, the trachea lumen was heat set to shape on a stainless steel mandrel which was machined to define the Trachea with a 'D' shaped cross section and then divided into the first two bronchial branches.A dozen of each form was created to demonstrate repeatability, resulting in identical structures. Our intent for this experiment was to demonstrate the ability of traditional textile forming methods to manufacture three-dimensional biomimetic scaffolds that are reproducible. The long term goal is to study how to incorporate these structures with growth agents, hydrogels, and other materials to deliberately construct reproducible scaffolds for tissue engineering. Using variations of the described textile forming methods, yarns with different growth agents can be laid into the textile structures in layers to encourage cell proliferation or anti-microbial properties. Many anatomical regions would be ideal for 3-D textile scaffolds. Hollow organs such as bowels, stomachs, bladders and blood vessels are ideal candidates. Orthopedic medicine could benefit from scaffolds for tendons and ligaments, or cartilage regeneration. As regenerative medicine matures into a commercial enterprise, this scalable, reproducible scaffold manufacturing method will be an excellent option.