Gradient Nanofiber Scaffold Libraries for Tissue Regeneration by Electrospinning

Published

October 15, 2008

Author(s)

Carl G. Simon Jr., Murugan Ramalingam, Marian F. Young, Vinoy Thomas

Abstract

Functional tissue engineering is a rapidly emerging biomedical field that holds great potential for healthcare in addressing the gap between need and availability of donor tissues and organs. The dogma in the field of tissue engineering is to harvest a biopsy of cells from a patient, seed them on a scaffold to culture a replacement tissue and transplant the cultured tissue into the defective site. One approach for fabricating tissue scaffolds is electrospinning. Electrospinning employs electrostatic forces to produce well-defined polymer fibers, ranging in diameter from a few microns down to tens of nanometers, which can be used as scaffolds for tissue generation. The merit of nanofiber scaffolds for tissue engineering is that they mimic the structural morphology of native extracellular matrix (ECM). Cells in vivo exist within an ECM which is composed of nanoscale fibers made of proteins such as collagen. Cell behavior is more physiological during culture in electrospun scaffolds because the scaffolds mimic this nanofibrous structure of native ECM.

Citation

The National Academies Research Associateship Program Newsletter

Pub Type

Others

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Keywords

nanofiber, biomaterial, polymer, scaffold, electrospinning

Citation

Simon, C. , Ramalingam, M. , Young, M. and Thomas, V. (2008), Gradient Nanofiber Scaffold Libraries for Tissue Regeneration by Electrospinning, The National Academies Research Associateship Program Newsletter, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=854136 (Accessed December 7, 2024)