Speaker
Description
Approaches towards tendon microarchitecture through melt electrowriting and melt-electrofibrillation
Jürgen Groll
Department of Functional Materials in Medicine and Dentistry at the Institute for Functional Materials and Biofabrication & Bavarian Polymer Institute, University of Würzburg, 97070 Würzburg, Germany
Melt electrowriting (MEW) is a relatively young additive manufacturing technology that exploits the focused deposition of a viscous thermoplast-melt thread onto a grounded target when ejected from a spinneret under voltage [1]. It enables the production of highly defined scaffold geometries built of fibers with diameters in the lower micrometer range [2].
This lecture will first demonstrate how MEW can be used to fabricate regular sinusoidal waved structures that mimic the morphology of tendons and the typical mechanical behavior [3]. The lecture will then shift towards exploiting the use of polymer-blends for MEW with a certain blend-immiscibility and a selective solubility after processing. At the example of PCL/PVAc the lecture will demonstrate that collagen mimetic bundles of nanofibrils with diameters far below the printing resolution of MEW can be achieved this way. A couple of specific topographic effects of the resulting collagen-mimetic PCL fibrillar constructs will be resented and discussed [4], including some most recent and so far unpublished results.
References
1) T.D. Brown, et al: Direct writing by way of melt electrospinning. Advanced Materials 2011, 23(47), 5651-7.
2) G. Hochleitner, et al: Additive manufacturing of scaffolds with sub-micron filaments via melt electrospinning writing. Biofabrication 2015, 7, 035002.
3) G. Hochleitner, F. Chen, C. Blum, P. D. Dalton, B. Amsden, J. Groll: Crimped elastomer scaffolds prepared through MEW with non-linear extension behaviour mimicking that of ligaments and tendons. Acta Biomaterialia 2018, 72, 110–120.
4) M. Ryma, et al: Translation of Collagen Ultrastructure to Biomaterial Fabrication for Material Independent but Highly Efficient Topographic Immunomodulation. Advanced Materials 2021, 33 (33), 2101228.