Bioresorbable elastomeric vascular tissue engineering scaffolds via melt spinning and electrospinning.

Current surgical therapy for diseased vessels less than 6mm in diameter involves bypass grafting with autologous arteries or veins. Although this surgical practice is common, it has significant limitations and complications, such as occlusion, intimal hyperplasia and compliance mismatch. As a result, cardiovascular biomaterials research has been motivated to develop tissue-engineered blood vessel substitutes.

Nanofibrous scaffolds electrospun from elastomeric biodegradable poly(L-lactide-co-epsilon-caprolactone) copolymer.

Electrospinning has recently received much attention in biomedical applications, and has shown great potential as a novel scaffold fabrication method for tissue engineering. The nano scale diameter of the fibers produced and the structure of the web resemble certain supramolecular features of extracellular matrix which is favorable for cell attachment, growth and proliferation. There are various parameters that can alter the electrospinning process, and varying one or more of these conditions will result in producing different nanofibrous webs.

A heterogeneous kinetic model for the cutinase-catalyzed hydrolysis of cyclo-tris-ethylene terephthalate.

The kinetics of enzyme-catalyzed hydrolysis of the polyester oligomer cyclo-tris-ethylene terephthalate, commonly known as cyclic trimer, using a developmental cutinase is reported. The effect of substrate surface area and enzyme concentration, in a largely aqueous medium, on the rate of hydrolysis was measured via spectrophotometric measurement using high performance liquid chromatography (lambda 254 nm) at 60 degrees C in a glycine buffer (pH 8). The rate was strongly dependent on the substrate's surface characteristics.