Tailor-Made and Biodegradable Vascular Scaffolds - Microsurgery: Advances, Simulations, and Applications - page 291

The functionalization of porogen will be very useful to expand and
break through the fabrication range of biodegradable scaffolds and
biological substrates. In this chapter, we proposed a novel method
to develop porous biodegradable scaffolds by use of magnetic sugar
particles (MSPs) as novel type of porogens.
100 Mm
Figure 8.27 A luorescent micrograph of HUVECs attached on a sheet-like
scaffold. White sites indicate the location of viable HUVECs.
The diameter of MSPs used for the scaffold varies from 300-
500 μ m (MSPs 2).
MSPs were successfully manipulated and assembled to form a
casting template by external magnetic force. The diameter and its
standard deviation (SD) of MSPs were highly tunable by using sieves
in hexane. Furthermore, the diameter was truly in the range of mesh
sizes of used sieves. Those diameter-controlled particles were cast
in PLCL and pores with controlled size were successfully connected
and generated inside scaffolds. Young's modulus and porosity as
important parameters for scaffolds were also tunable and good
correlation between those parameters were conirmed. We believe
that MSPs will be important tools for the fabrication of biodegradable
scaffolds with controlled pore size, pore layout and total scaffold
porosity. Fabrication of patterned spherical pores on a substrate is
very dificult to achieve by previous lithographic techniques even if
the substrate is 2D. The advantages of using magnetic porogens are
that (i) porosity and pore layouts in scaffolds can be controlled by
patterning the magnetic ield and (ii) magnetic assembly ensures
well-connected pores inside scaffolds.