A morphological study of porous polylactide scaffolds prepared by thermally induced phase separation

Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Via Thermally Induced Phase Separation

“…A liquid-liquid phase separation occurs when the temperature of polymer solution is decreased and depended of the thermal driving force. The cloud-point temperature was highly dependent on water content, polymer concentration and the freezing point of the system was nearly independent of polymer concentration and water content (Barroca et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2010;Jun et al, 2003). The cloud point temperature increases as the polymer concentration increases and when the molecular weight of the polymer increases because it reduces the polymer-solvent interaction.…”

“…TIPS is thus a very convenient methodology for fabricating porous materials as scaffold architectures that can be obtained by means of the manipulation of processing parameters and system properties. A variety of polymers scaffolds as Polylactic Acid (Chen J et al, 2010;He L et al, 2009); Polyurethane (Guan J et al,2005;Martinez et al, 2006;Fromstein et al 2002), Polycaprolactone[15] and others have been prepared by TIPS technique, also blends of polymers [Martel et al, 2010;Maquet et al, 2001), and composite of polymers with nanohydroxyapatite , Carbon nanotubes Jell et al, 2008) and other have been successfully fabricated. …”

Mimicking the quasi-random assembly of protein fibers in the dermis by freeze-drying method

“…Commonly used techniques are: particulate leaching [8], emulsion templating [9,10], electro spinning [11], rapid prototyping [12], phase separation [13][14][15], and mostly freeze-drying [1,[16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…In this method, aqueous solutions are often used to fabricate scaffolds. When compared to the other methods [8][9][10][13][14][15], the freeze-drying process does not bring any impurities into the samples and a further purifying process is therefore not necessary. The low temperature of the freeze-drying process helps maintain the activity of biomacromolecules and pharmaceuticals [21].…”

Scaffold design and characterisation for osteochondral tissue regeneration

“…Schugens et al studied that no liquid-liquid phase separation is observed when solutions of polylactides in 1,4-dioxane are cooled, at least until a solid-liquid phase separation occurs due to solvent crystallization. Which corresponds to the case where the critical solution temperature of liquid-liquid phase separation is largely lower than the freezing point of the solvent (157,158). In this chapter the techniques used to prepare and characterise the materials involved in this work will be described.…”