Fabrication and improvement of PCL/alginate/PAAm scaffold via selective laser sintering for tissue engineering

Abstract

In this work, porous polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffolds were designed and fabricated using selective laser sintering (SLS). The critical processing parameters of the SLS for PCL were optimised. This work post-processed these PCL scaffolds to produce PCL/alginate/polyacrylamide (PAAm) scaffolds to improve their performance. The experiment mechanical property assessment showed that the sample’s average elastic modulus increases from 6.99 MPa (PCL) to 12.67 MPa (PCL/alginate/PAAm), and the elongation at break of samples increases from 59% (PCL) to 112.9% (PCL/alginate/PAAm). Cell seeding and in vitro culture showed that cell viability remained above 94% over 5 days. Thus, the current study suggests that a promising strategy for the improvement of the characteristics of PCL/alginate/PAAm scaffolds and advances the potential application of SLS technique towards skeletal tissue repair.