Introduction of sacrificial bonds to hydrogels to increase defect tolerance during suturing of multilayer vascular grafts.

Unlabelled: Small-caliber vascular grafts used in coronary artery bypass procedures typically fail due to the development of intimal hyperplasia or thrombosis. Our laboratory has developed a multilayered vascular graft with an electrospun polyurethane outer layer with improved compliance matching and a hydrogel inner layer that is both thromboresistant and promotes endothelialization. Initial in vivo studies showed that hydrogel particulates were dislodged from the hydrogel layer of the grafts during suturing.

Synthesis and Characterization of Plug-and-Play Polyurethane Urea Elastomers as Biodegradable Matrixes for Tissue Engineering Applications.

The highly tunable mechanical properties and resilience of polyurethanes make them promising candidates for tissue engineering applications. Biodegradability is conferred by incorporation of hydrolytically or enzymatically cleavable moieties into the polyurethane structure. A common choice for the biodegradable soft segment is a poly(ether ester) triblock copolymer synthesized by ring opening polymerization of the polyester from a polyether macroinitiator.

Recent advancements in electrospinning design for tissue engineering applications: A review.

Electrospinning, a technique used to fabricate fibrous scaffolds, has gained popularity in recent years as a method to produce tissue engineered grafts with architectural similarities to the extracellular matrix. Beyond its versatility in material selection, electrospinning also provides many tools to tune the fiber morphology and scaffold geometry. Recent efforts have focused on extending the capabilities of electrospinning to produce scaffolds that better recapitulate tissue properties and enhance regeneration.

Fabrication of macromolecular gradients in aligned fiber scaffolds using a combination of in-line blending and air-gap electrospinning.

Unlabelled: Although a variety of fabrication methods have been developed to generate electrospun meshes with gradient properties, no platform has yet to achieve fiber alignment in the direction of the gradient that mimics the native tendon-bone interface. In this study, we present a method combining in-line blending and air-gap electrospinning to address this limitation in the field. A custom collector with synced rotation permitted fiber collection with uniform mesh thickness and periodic copper wires were used to induce fiber alignment.