Conductive collagen/polypyrrole-b-polycaprolactone hydrogel for bioprinting of neural tissue constructs
Journal Title: International Journal of Bioprinting - Year 2019, Vol 5, Issue 2
Abstract
Bioprinting is increasingly being used for fabrication of engineered tissues for regenerative medicine, drug testing, and other biomedical applications. The success of this technology lies with the development of suitable bioinks and hydrogels that are specific to the intended tissue application. For applications such as neural tissue engineering, conductivity plays an important role in determining the neural differentiation and neural tissue regeneration. Although several conductive hydrogels based on metal nanoparticles (NPs) such as gold and silver, carbon-based materials such as graphene and carbon nanotubes and conducting polymers such as polypyrrole (PPy) and polyaniline were used, they possess several disadvantages. The long-term cytotoxicity of metal nanoparticles (NPs) and carbon-based materials restricts their use in regenerative medicine. The conductive polymers, on the other hand, are non-biodegradable and possess weak mechanical properties limiting their printability into three-dimensional constructs. The aim of this study is to develop a biodegradable, conductive, and printable hydrogel based on collagen and a block copolymer of PPy and polycaprolactone (PCL) (PPy-block-poly(caprolactone) [PPyb-PCL]) for bioprinting of neural tissue constructs. The printability, including the influence of the printing speed and material flow rate on the printed fiber width; rheological properties; and cytotoxicity of these hydrogels were studied. The results prove that the collagen/PPy-b-PCL hydrogels possessed better printability and biocompatibility. Thus, the collagen/PPy-bPCL hydrogels reported this study has the potential to be used in the bioprinting of neural tissue constructs for the repair of damaged neural tissues and drug testing or precision medicine applications.
Authors and Affiliations
Sanjairaj Vijayavenkataraman, Novelia Vialli, Jerry Y. H. Fuh, Wen Feng Lu
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678716
- DOI -
- Views 172
- Downloads 0
Solvent-based Extrusion 3D Printing for the Fabrication of Tissue Engineering Scaffolds
Three-dimensional (3D) printing has been emerging as a new technology for scaffold fabrication to overcome the problems associated with the undesirable microstructure associated with the use of traditional methods. Solve...
3D bioprinting technology for regenerative medicine application
Alternative strategies that overcome existing organ transplantation methods are of increasing importance because of ongoing demands and lack of adequate organ donors. Recent improvements in tissue engineering techniques...
Post-printing surface modification and functionalization of 3D-printed biomedical device
3D printing is a technology well-suited for biomedical applications due to its ability to create highly complex and arbitrary structures from personalized designs with a fast turnaround. However, due to a limited selecti...
Hydrolytic Expansion Induces Corrosion Propagation for Increased Fe Biodegradation
Fe is regarded as a promising bone implant material due to inherent degradability and high mechanical strength, but its degradation rate is too slow to match the healing rate of bone. In this work, hydrolytic expansion w...
Optimization of a 3D bioprinting process using ultrashort peptide bioinks
The field of three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting is rapidly emerging as an additive manufacturing method for tissue and organ fabrication. The demand for tissues and organ transplants is ever increasing, although donors a...