Polyesters tissue engineering scaffolds

Electrospinning of PHA is still relatively new in scaffold fabrication. To date, P(3HB) and P(3HB-co-3HV) are the most common microbial polyesters to be electrospun into tissue-engineering scaffolds. Suwantong et al. (2007) prepared ultrafine electrospun fiber mats of P(3HB) and P(3HB-co-3HV) as scaffolding materials for skin and nerve generation, hi their study, they evaluated the in vitro biocompatibility of these fibers using mouse fibroblasts and Schwann cells... 

As the major requirement of tissue engineering scaffolds, those polyesters and their monomers should be biocompatible with human bodies. Polyesters degrade by hydrolysis of the ester bond. PGA is hydrophilic in nature and it degrades rapidly in vitro aqueous solution or in vivo fast. PLA is more hydrophobic than PGA because of the extra methyl group in the repeating units. 

Both synthetic and natural polymers such as polyesters and extracellular macromolecules have been widely used to construct tissue engineered scaffolds. 

Migneco, E, Y.C. Huang, R.K. Birla and S.J. Hollister (2009), Poly(glycerol-dodecanoate), a biodegradable polyester for medical devices and tissue engineering scaffolds. Biomaterials, 30(33) pp. 6479-6484. 

Another group of polymers that have attracted increasing attention for their use as tissue engineering scaffolds in the last decade are degradable polymers, in particular polyesters (e.g. polylactide, polyglycolide), proteins and polysaccharides. 

PREPARATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF POLYESTER THERMOSET XEROGELS FOR TISSUE ENGINEERING SCAFFOLDS... 

In order to develop a tissue-engineered heart valve, a group at Children s Hospital in Boston evaluated several synthetic absorbable polyesters as potential scaffolding materials for heart valves. Unfoitu-nately, the most synthetic polyesters proved to be too stiff to be function as flexible leaflets inside a tri-leaflet valve. " In the late 1990s, a much more flexible PHAs called poly-3-hydroxyoctanoate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate (PHO) was used as the scaffold material for the valve leaflet, and then the entire heart valve. ... 

Selection of a tissue engineering substrate includes a choice between absorbable and nonabsorbable material, as well as a choice between synthetic and naturally derived materials. The most common synthetic polymers used for fibrous meshes and porous scaffolds include polyesters such as polylactide and polyglycolide and their copolymers, polycaprolactone, and polyethylene glycol. Synthetic polymers have advantages over natural polymers in select instances, such as the following i... 

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