title: Manipulating co-continuous polymer blends to create PCL scaffolds with fully interconnected and anisotropic pore architecture.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Polymer blending is an attractive route to obtain new materials with superior properties. Control of their characteristics may be initially achieved by manipulating the phase morphology with different aspects (i.e, lamellar, dispersed or fibrillar) to form tailored architectures for different application fields. In particular, co-continuous microstructures due to the interpenetration of two different polymer phases in three dimensions are particularly interesting because they are able to offer a fully interconnected network with improvement of mechanical properties and fluid permeability for tissue engineering applications.
  
  
  METHODS
  Macro/microporous substrates with controlled architecture were obtained by blending hydrophylic and hydrophobic polymers, i.e, polycaprolactone (PCL) and poly(ethylene oxide)(PEO) respectively, in a co-continuous state by a twin-screw extruder.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In accordance with the leaching-based approaches traditionally used in scaffold manufacturing, the removal of water soluble phases (i.e., PEO and sodium chloride (NaCl) crystals) enables a fully interconnected porous network to be formed, whereas post-extrusion stretching of the melt blend allows a desired elongation of polymer phases to be imparted before the polymer leaching, thus providing a controlled pore alignment.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  the proposed investigation confirms that polymer blending is a promising approach to realize structurally organized platforms able to guide the regeneration processes of hierarchically organized tissues (i.e, tendons, muscles, ligaments and nerves).
authors: Institute of Composite and Biomedical Materials, National Research Council, Naples, Italy. vguarino@unina.it
authors: Vincenzo
authors: V
authors: Guarino
authors: Angela
authors: A
authors: Guaccio
authors: Luigi
authors: L
authors: Ambrosio
mesh_terms: D016880:Anisotropy; D001672:Biocompatible Materials / Q000138:chemical synthesis*; D008422:Materials Testing; D011091:Polyesters / Q000737:chemistry*; D011092:Polyethylene Glycols / Q000737:chemistry*; D016062:Porosity; D013499:Surface Properties; D054457:Tissue Scaffolds
chemical_list: D001672:Biocompatible Materials; D011091:Polyesters; C016240:polycaprolactone; D011092:Polyethylene Glycols