Preparation and characterization of electrospun alginate/PLA nanofibers as tissue engineering material by emulsion eletrospinning
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary field that combines the engineering with the life sciences to biological substitutes. Biomaterials play an important role in the particular fields by providing matrices for cellular growth, proliferation, and new tissue formation. With more precisely controlling scaffold material, the types of scaffold and the quality of tissue formed will become versatile (Langer and Vacanti, 2016). In the past ten years, some obvious development in electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds have been used for tissue engineering. Biodegradable polymer like poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) (Mehrasa et al., 2015), poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) (Hu et al., 2016), polylactic acid (PLA) (Santoro et al., 2016) have been used as tissue engineering scaffold materials in many potential application fields.
Polylactic acid (PLA) has been widely used in variety of biomedical application owing to its biocompatibility, biodegradability and good solubility in some organic solvents like dichoromethane, chloroform, acetone, N,N-Dimethylformamide and Dimethylacetamide (Casasola et al., 2014). When designing to be a cell scaffold, Polylactic acid, alone or combining with other biodegradable material, provides an excellent environment for cell growth because of its physical properties (Armentano et al., 2013, Santoro et al., 2016). However, the hydrophobic surface of PLA is application limitation in a hydrophilic bio-environment. For example, it will occur large dimensional changes in the scaffold which would be harmful to the anchored cells. The hydrophobicity of PLA also results in low cell affinity and it can elicit an inflammatory response from the living host upon direct contact with biological fluids (Guo et al., 2015, Murariu and Dubois, 2016, Stankevich et al., 2015). In order to expand the use of PLA, hydrophilic polymer like polyethylene oxide (PEO) (Zhao et al., 2012), poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) (Abdal-hay et al., 2016) have been used in the modifications of PLA to improve its hydrophilicity.
Sodium alginate (SA) has various applications such as environmental, clinical, biomedical and other areas because of its anti-bacterial, hydrophilicity and biocompatibility. It׳s one of the widely used dressing materials because it tends to dissolve or gel in the wound bed and form a kind of swelled calcium alginates after the ion-change reaction between sodium alginate and Ca2+ after it contact with blood or tissue fluid, and then block the further bleeding of wound. Also because of its good hydrophilicity and biocompatibility, it have been used in dental impression material (Won et al., 2014, Wang et al., 2003, Yan et al., 2013). Zhu et al. (Zhu and Shen, 2002) successfully use sodium alginate to modify PLA films via an entrapment method, which enhanced the hydrophilicity of the PLA films. However, this simple surface treatment method is just suitable for films, limiting the application of PLA in other fields.
Electrospinning was first patented by Du Pont and got further improvement over the next decades to produce composite, shaped or matrix fibers composed of a mixture of two or more components (Arthur and Edwin, 1956, Hener, 1942). The emulsions applied for electrospinning contain an water phase which could dissolve bioactive protein, hydrophilic drug and biomaterial, and the oil phase which is a polymer (biocompatible and biodegradable) dissolved in organic solvent (Tian et al., 2012). During the process of electrospinning, emulsion containing oil phase and aqueous phase can be elongated and form fibers with core–shell structure (Li et al., 2010) or aqueous phase will be randomly distributed within the fiber membrane ix (Chew et al., 2005). Li et al. (2013) electrospun CNC-PLA water-in-oil(W/O) emulsion to get core–shell or hollow structure fibers, and founding a correlative relationship between emulsion droplet size and fiber structure.
In our research, nanofibers with sodium alginate and polylactic acid were fabricated by using w/o emulsion electrospinning. Here, sodium alginate can gel and block the pore of the dressing then provide an environment for the wound bed, and PLA can provide the tensile strength for the whole dressing. In this paper we will discuss whether this kind of special composite fiber have the potential application as a kind of tissue engineering material.
Section snippets
Material
Sodium alginate A2158 was purchased from Sigma-Aldrich, surfactant Span80 (chemical grade) was purchased from Tianjin Fuchen Chemical Reagent Factory. Polylactic acid (PLA) was supplied by Natureworks LLC, with the product code of PLA 403 2D. Chloroform (analysis grade) was purchased from Tianjin Fuchen Chemical reagent factory (Tianjin, China), DMSO and Cholamine were purchased from Tianjin Fuyu Fine-Chemicals Co., Ltd. (Tianjin, China), and Rhodamine B was purchased from Sigma-Aldrich. All of
Physical properties of SA/PLA emulsions
According to Table 1, SA/PLA emulsions composing oil phase, surfactant and different ratios of water phase were prepared.
The viscosity and surface tension are two factor influencing the eletrospinning process of polymer solution, and all of them will be influence by the second phase of SA in SA/PLA emulsion solution. In order to study how SA distributed in the PLA solution and its influence on solution properties, we studied the viscosity and surface tension of solutions, and variation trend
Conclusion
A method for producing electrospun SA/PLA membrane from a single setup had been achieved by emulsion electrospinning, which alleviates the need for two sets of separate electrospinning systems or a coaxial electrospinning setup. The possibility of having SA/PLA nanofibers had been confirmed by SEM images and the distribution of SA on the fiber surface had been confirmed by CLSM images and FT-IR spectra. Meanwhile, the nanofiber membranes showed good hydrophilic and preferable mechanical
Acknowledgments
Weihong Xu and Renzhe Shen contributed equally to this work and should be considered co-first authors. The research Grants supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China – Youth Foundation (No. 5110620) and National Natural Science Foundation of China – the state Key Program of (No. 21234003) are appreciated.
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These authors contributed equally to this study and should be considered as co-first authors.