Tubular Poly(ε-caprolactone)/Chitosan Nanofibrous Scaffold Prepared by Electrospinning for Vascular Tissue Engineering Applications

Over the years, cardiovascular diseases have been a real life-threatening condition that causes mortality to a lot of people around the globe. The immediate need for a proper treatment encouraged scientists to develop vascular grafts to be used as a solution. However, these vascular grafts tend to show some drawbacks which led the scientists to introduce the field of vascular tissue engineering to overcome the problem. In this study, we emphasized the use of tubular nanofibrous scaffold that is a blend of the synthetic polyester Poly(epsilon-caprolactone) (PCL) and the natural polysaccharide Chitosan (CS). PCL/CS scaffold was fabricated by electrospinning technique. Several tests were performed to evaluate physical, mechanical and morphological properties of PCL/CS scaffolds such as Tensile Test, Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Furthermore, Differential Scanning Calorimetric (DSC) and Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) were also performed. We investigated whether this scaffold would be able to support cell attachment and proliferation and become part of a blood vessel. This was done by seeding and culturing Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVEC) onto the scaffold under feasible conditions. We demonstrated that PCL/CS scaffold does support HUVEC cell attachment, growth and long term proliferation. Given the results of these tests and the biocompatibility of the PCL/CS tubular nanofibrous scaffolds, we found that the blended PCL/CS scaffold has promising properties to be used as a replacement in the blood vessel applications.