Fibrous grafts closely mimic the native extracellular matrix making them suitable for tissue engineering applications such as cardiovascular grafts. Our lab is able to fabricate these fibrous grafts by electrospinning natural or synthetic polymer solutions onto various collectors. By altering properties such as fiber alignment and fiber diameter, we are able to modulate cell attachment, proliferation, and migration. The ease of modification to the fiber diameter also enables a method to tune drug diffusion from electrospun grafts such as antimicrobial bone grafts.
Emulsion templating is a fabrication strategy often used to produce porous materials. This process involves making high internal phase emulsions (HIPEs). HIPE systems can be water-in-oil or oil-in-water mixtures, and typically consist of an internal phase that constitutes more than 74% of the volume. This internal phase is dispersed as droplets within a continuous phase that consists of reactive monomer units. Upon polymerization, the dispersed droplet geometry is locked in as the monomers polymerize, resulting in a porous matrix. Significant amount of research has been dedicated to polyHIPEs and their applications range from biomedical cell-matrices to foams used for petroleum oil production.
Our lab built a customized 3D printer to explore the capabilities of using the polymers developed at the lab for different bone tissue engineering applications. Particularly, we are interested in using polymerized high internal phase emulsion (polyHIPEs) to fabricate porous bone graft that could match the shape and geometry of the defects. The emulsion templating strategy provides a microporous structure and the 3D printing capabilities allows us to provide channels and macroporosity into the grafts. Advantages of this process is that is solvent-free and performed at room temperature. In addition, multilateral constructs could be printed to provide a stranger frame to increase the mechanical properties of the grafts.
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University of Texas at Austin - Department of Biomedical Engineering
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