초록 |
In recent years, biodegradable polymers have been used to fabricate porous scaffolds for three-dimensional cell and tissue cultures to regenerate tissue-based artificial organs. Until now, synthetic biodegradable polymers, such as poly(L-lactic acid), poly(glycolic acid), and poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) have been most widely used to fabricate 3-D scaffolds. However, these polymers have limitations for some applications because of their brittleness, hydrophobicity, and low cell adhesiveness. Recently poly-p-dioxanone (PDO) has been interested in the applications for tissue engineering areas since this polymer has biocompatibility and biodegradability as well as flexibility, and thus was approved for human use by FDA. However, tissue scaffold fabrications from PDO were also limited due to its poor solubility (solvents to dissolve PDO are few, while they are needed for almost scaffold fabrication methods). In this study, we firstly fabricated porous PDO scaffolds using a melt-molding particulate-leaching method developed by our laboratory. This method does not need any organic solvents during the fabrication process. To improve their hydrophilicity and cell compatibility, PDO was blended with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) with different ratio. The hydrophilicity, morphology, pore sizes and porosity, and mechanical properties (bi-axial tensile test) of the prepared PDO scaffolds were investigated. The scaffolds were also examined for their in vitro cell compatibility (culture of human chondrocytes) and in vivo tissue compatibility (subcutaneous implantation into back of SD rat). The results were evaluated by MTT assay and histology examinations. |