A review of evolution of electrospun tissue engineering scaffold: From two dimensions to three dimensions

Abstract

The potential of electrospinning process to fabricate ultrafine fibers as building blocks for tissue engineering scaffolds is well recognized. The scaffold construct produced by electrospinning process depends on the quality of the fibers. In electrospinning, material selection and parameter setting are among many factors that contribute to the quality of the ultrafine fibers, which eventually determine the performance of the tissue engineering scaffolds. The major challenge of conventional electrospun scaffolds is the nature of electrospinning process which can only produce two-dimensional electrospun mats, hence limiting their applications. Researchers have started to focus on overcoming this limitation by combining electrospinning with other techniques to fabricate three-dimensional scaffold constructs. This article reviews various polymeric materials and their composites/blends that have been successfully electrospun for tissue engineering scaffolds, their mechanical properties, and the various parameters settings that influence the fiber morphology. This review also highlights the secondary processes to electrospinning that have been used to develop three-dimensional tissue engineering scaffolds as well as the steps undertaken to overcome electrospinning limitations.

Current Progress in Tendon and Ligament Tissue Engineering

“…Characteristics of electrospun fiber are affected by the parameters such as viscosity of the polymer solution, distance between the needle tip and the collector, the voltage applied, the flow rate, the spinning temperature, the rotation speed of collector, the spinning duration, the environment temperature and humidity [71,100]. Viscosity of the polymer solution is the most important parameter in controlling the fiber diameter whereby increased viscosity leads to the formation of fibers with larger diameter.…”

“…In term of flow rate, increasing the volume per hour would eject the solution at larger amount in a given time that could result in thicker diameter. Achieving finest fiber diameter is crucial as it will also produce a higher surface-to-volume ratio of the scaffold that could promote and increase cell proliferation and adhesion [71,100,101]. An example of electrospun fibers is shown in Fig.…”

Novel Processing Technique to Produce Three Dimensional Polyvinyl Alcohol/Maghemite Nanofiber Scaffold Suitable for Hard Tissues

“…In order to overcome this limitation, researchers have proposed 3D electrospun tissue engineering scaffolds by making modifications on the electrospinning process. These include redesigning the electrospinning collector [13,14,15], rolling up the nanofiber produced so as to make it multi-layered [16,17], vapor sintering [18], and changing the collector by using a cold plate collector [19,20]. These modifications are able to solve the limitation on the thickness to some extent, but the resulting scaffolds still lack in terms of strength.…”

Electrospinning pectin-based nanofibers: a parametric and cross-linker study

“…The matrix is composed of fiber forming proteins as well as collagen fibers and soluble factors (Hinderer et al 2016). There is a great interest in fabricating scaffolds using nanofibers mimicking ECM for tissue engineering, considering the majority of the ECM biomolecules are at nanoscale and fibrous (Ao et al 2017;Ingavle and Leach 2014;Limongi et al 2016;Mortimer and Wright 2017;Ngadiman et al 2017). Scaffolds with nanoscale architectures provide many more binding sites to cell membrane receptors, compared with micropore or microfiber scaffolds (Stevens and George 2005).…”