One of the major challenges faced by current tissue engineering is how to mass produce stent materials to meet the needs of clinical patients. According to the latest news from the University of Missouri, the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with researchers from North Carolina State University, found that three new textile technologies can be used to produce tissue engineering scaffolds that can be produced on a large scale and are more cost-effective.
Tissue engineering is a process in which stem cells are "planted" in biological material to grow and replace defective tissue. This requires stents to support stem cells with special materials, and eventually the stent will break down leaving only natural tissue. These tissues can help patients with tissue damage due to diabetes, circulatory disorders, etc., and need to replace cartilage, bone, and breast tissue.
Tissue engineering stents are usually made of fibers. In the past, electrospinning technology was used to combine non-woven fibers through an electrostatic field to create stem-cell-attached stents, but this method is not economical for large-scale production.
Elizabeth Ropova, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Missouri, said that the fibers produced by electrospinning technology are fragile, and the stents are inconsistent and some holes are too small. Therefore, they want to test methods to standardize this process with the goal of expanding the scale of production. And ensure that the material looks the same, the same nature, can be used for clinical design.
The research team inspected the production process of textiles such as clothes, curtain fabrics, and tested three new types of textile methods—meltblown, spunbond, and combing, to produce polylactic acid (PLA) stents. Polylactic acid has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and can be used as a collagen filler to grow human stem cells. Then they spent three weeks studying whether stem cells can stay healthy and start to differentiate into fat and bone cells. The results prove that these three textile methods are feasible.
Robova said that these alternatives are more cost-effective than electrospinning. A small sample of electrospinning material costs between two and five dollars, while the manufacturing cost using these three technologies is only 0.3 to three dollars. economic. The team's next plan is to test the performance of the stents produced by these three methods in animals.
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