Electrospun Zein Fibers Incorporating Poly(glycerol sebacate) for Soft Tissue Engineering

Abstract

For biomedical applications such as soft tissue engineering, plant proteins are becoming increasingly attractive. Zein, a class of prolamine proteins found in corn, offers excellent properties for application in the human body, but has inferior mechanical properties and lacks aqueous stability. In this study, electrospun scaffolds from neat zein and zein blended with prepolymer and mildly cross-linked poly(glycerol sebacate) (PGS) were fabricated. Less toxic solvents like acetic acid and ethanol were used. The morphological, physiochemical and degradation properties of the as-spun fiber mats were determined. Neat zein and zein-PGS fiber mats with high zein concentration (24 wt % and 27 wt %) showed defect-free microstructures. The average fiber diameter decreased with increasing PGS amount from 0.7 ± 0.2 µm to 0.09 ± 0.03 µm. The addition of PGS to zein resulted in a seven-fold increase in ultimate tensile strength and a four-fold increase in failure strain, whereas the Young’s Modulus did not change significantly. Degradation tests in phosphate buffered saline revealed the morphological instability of zein containing fiber mats in contact with aqueous media. Therefore, the fibers were in situ cross-linked with N-(3-Dimethylaminopropyl)-N′-ethylcarbodiimide (EDC)/N-Hydroxysuccinimide (NHS), which led to improved morphological stability in aqueous environment. The novel fibers have suitable properties for application in soft tissue engineering.

Engineering of Nanofibrous Amorphous and Crystalline Solid Dispersions for Oral Drug Delivery

“…As the fiber jet accelerates towards the collector it undergoes chaotic whipping instability which increases the transit time and path length to the collector, allowing the solvent to evaporate leaving solid, thin fibers. Cheng et al presented electrospinning as a novel processing method to generate functional nanomaterials with many applications ranging from wound healing and medical textiles, to production of oral-dispersible film SD and controlled delivery systems [27,53,54,55]. Electrospinning is a rapid solvent evaporation process well suited to amorphous materials as by this process the drug does not have time to form a crystal lattice within the nanofiber and remains distributed in its amorphous form at a molecular scale [56].…”

Poly(Glycerol Sebacate)–Poly(l-Lactide) Nonwovens. Towards Attractive Electrospun Material for Tissue Engineering

“…The recent three years brought a few more publications from the scope of PGS electrospinning, with a focus on applications for soft tissue engineering and nerve tissue engineering [19][20][21][22][23][24][25], and a few more about the electrospinning process with PGS as one of the components [26][27][28][29][30][31]. None of them, however, were devoted to investigations of electrospinning of PLA-PGS blends.…”

Protein-Based Fiber Materials in Medicine: A Review

“…Studies have shown that the corn protein is compatible with human umbilical vein endothelial cells, human hepatocytes, and mice fibroblasts [ 103 ]. Neat zein nanofibers have been shown to exhibit low mechanical strength and stability, and the high hydrophobicity of the protein may also prevent cell attachment [ 104 , 105 , 106 ]. Therefore, it is often necessary to incorporate additional synthetic or natural polymers and chemical crosslinking to create successful tissue engineering scaffolds.…”