Effect of well defined dodecahedral porosity on inflammation and angiogenesis

Porosity is an important factor in the healing of prosthetic devices. To better understand this phenomenon, porous polyurethane scaffolds were produced by a variation of the phase inversion/porogen extraction technique in which a prepacked column of spherical porogen particles was infiltrated with a polymer solution before polymer precipitation and porogen extraction. Scaffolds contained pores of well defined shape (approaching open faced pentagonal dodecahedra), narrow size distributions (66.1 +/- 1.3 mum, 84.2 +/- 1.7 mum, and 156.9 +/- 1.2 mum) and high interconnectivity (interconnecting windows of 30.1 +/- 0.8 mum, 41.9 +/- 1.5 mum, and 76.4 +/- 2.0 mum, respectively). A high degree of accessible macroporosity (>80%) could be achieved while limiting the mostly inaccessible microporosity to below 2%. The neovascularization and inflammatory responses to the scaffolds were evaluated in the subcutaneous rat model for 4 weeks. The inflammatory response index and foreign body giant cell index could be reduced by 56% (p < 0.05) and 21% (p < 0.02), respectively, when the pore size was increased from 66 mum to 157 mum, whereas the vascularization index and arteriolar index remained unchanged. Thus, a significant decrease in inflammatory response could be achieved without adversely affecting the degree of neovascularization by increasing the size of the pores.