Over the past two decades, electrospinning has emerged as a common technique to produce biomedical scaffolds composed of ultrafine fibers formed from many natural and synthetic polymers. A major advantage of this technique is the ability to produce scaffolds that resemble the native extracellular matrix in physical, chemical, and topological properties. However, scaffolds fabricated via electrospinning are not formed with a controlled architecture and typically do a poor job of directing cell growth into prescribed structures for tissue/organ development. To address these weaknesses, 3D bioprinting has recently been used to develop scaffolds that have a highly organized and precise global topology. Unfortunately, these 3D bioprinted scaffolds do not typically resemble the native extracellular matrix in physical properties, such as porosity, fiber diameter, and pore size (e.g., the microarchitecture). Thus, the goal of the current study was to develop a technique that harnesses the intrinsic advantages of both conventional electrospinning and 3D bioprinting techniques to produce scaffolds that have the potential to be used within biomedical applications. The physical properties of formed 3D printed electrospun scaffolds were compared with conventional electrospun and 3D printed scaffolds. Further, we conducted initial proof-of-concept biocompatibility studies to illustrate the applicability of the scaffolds within vascular applications. Our results illustrate that 3D printed electrospun scaffolds can be developed, via our technique, that have highly tailored and organized arbitrary geometries with scaffold properties in the range of the innate extracellular matrix. In addition, these scaffolds were shown to support endothelial cell growth. Therefore, we illustrate the development and testing of a novel bioscaffold fabrication technique that may be used for many tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications, which allows for the direct printing of electrospun scaffolds into well-defined macro-scale geometries that also retain the micro-structures commonly observed in electrospun scaffolds.

中文翻译：

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开发 3D 打印静电纺丝支架，用于制造血管应用的多孔支架

在过去的二十年中，静电纺丝已成为生产由许多天然和合成聚合物形成的超细纤维组成的生物医学支架的常用技术。该技术的主要优点是能够生产在物理、化学和拓扑特性方面类似于天然细胞外基质的支架。然而，通过静电纺丝制造的支架并不是以受控的结构形成的，并且通常在引导细胞生长到组织/器官发育的规定结构方面表现不佳。为了解决这些弱点，3D 生物打印最近被用来开发具有高度组织和精确的全局拓扑的支架。不幸的是，这些3D生物打印支架的物理特性通常与天然细胞外基质不同，例如孔隙率、纤维直径和孔径（例如微结构）。因此，当前研究的目标是开发一种技术，利用传统静电纺丝和 3D 生物打印技术的内在优势来生产有潜力在生物医学应用中使用的支架。将形成的 3D 打印电纺支架的物理性能与传统电纺支架和 3D 打印支架进行比较。此外，我们进行了初步的概念验证生物相容性研究，以说明支架在血管应用中的适用性。我们的结果表明，通过我们的技术可以开发出 3D 打印的静电纺丝支架，该支架具有高度定制和组织的任意几何形状，其支架特性在先天细胞外基质的范围内。此外，这些支架被证明可以支持内皮细胞生长。因此，我们阐述了一种新型生物支架制造技术的开发和测试，该技术可用于许多组织工程和再生医学应用，该技术允许将电纺支架直接打印成明确的宏观几何形状，同时保留微观结构。静电纺丝支架中常见的结构。