Biomaterials

Biography

Biography: Luanda C Lins

Abstract

Electrospun piezoelectric fibers can be used in neural tissue engineering to mimic the physical, biological and material properties of the native extracellular matrix. In this study, we employed fibers scaffolds for the tissue engineering of the neuro-application. To study the role that three- dimensional scaffolds plays, a rotating drum collector was used to electrospun polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) fibers at various rotation speeds and the morphology, orientation, polymorphism and mechanical behavior of the non-aligned and aligned fibers were characterized. We found that the mechanical and columbic force by electrospinning of PVDF induced local conformation change to promote the β-phase. Neural stem cells (NSCs) were seeded on non-aligned and aligned scaffolds and cell morphology, survival and neuronal and glial differentiation were studied by microscopic techniques. We noted that specific degrees of scaffold anisotropy might represent a critical design feature in the fabrication of scaffolds. Our results showed that the survival of NSCs and the capacity of NSCs to differentiate in the neuronal and glial pathways depend on the degree of alignment of the fibers. These results demonstrate that piezoelectric fiber-aligned scaffolds may serve as instructive scaffolds for NSC survival and differentiation and may be valuable tools for the development of cell and scaffold based strategies for neural repair.