Preparation and Characterization of Biodegradable Electrospun core-sheath yarn for Bio-medical purposes

摘要

Electrospinning is a simple and versatile technique to produce micro and nano- fibers from a variety of materials such as synthetic non-biodegradable, natural and synthetic biodegradable. Naturally occurring biodegradable polymers such as Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) can be biosynthesized from cyanobacteria such as Anabaena in a cost effective and sustainable manner. These polymers have been characterized to have many attractive properties such as high tensile strength, biocompatibility and biodegradability thus are suitable candidates for use in the biomedical field. Inspite of these developments, very few studies related to electrospinning of cyanobacterial PHB and its application in biomedical field are present in literature. The current study describes the preparation of a PHB-PLA based yarn having a core-sheath arrangement using electrospinning equipment with novel modifications. The characterization of the resultant yarn showed that core sheath arrangement was beneficial in combining the complementary qualities of PL A and PHB polymers. The core-sheath yarn showed improved cell viability upto approx. 98.4 % as compared to the cell viability on individual polymer material which were at approx. 89.2% for PLA and approx. 90.76% for PHB polymer. Thus the cell supporting nature of core sheath yarn arrangement proves can be successfully utilized in biomedical applications.