Polymer-Bioactive Glass Composite Filaments for 3D Scaffold Manufacturing by Fused Deposition Modeling: Fabrication and Characterization

Thomas Distler; Niklas Fournier; Alina Grünewald; Christian Polley; Hermann Seitz; Rainer Detsch; Aldo R Boccaccini

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2020.00552

Polymer-Bioactive Glass Composite Filaments for 3D Scaffold Manufacturing by Fused Deposition Modeling: Fabrication and Characterization

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2020 Jun 24:8:552. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2020.00552. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Thomas Distler¹, Niklas Fournier¹, Alina Grünewald¹, Christian Polley², Hermann Seitz², Rainer Detsch¹, Aldo R Boccaccini¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Biomaterials, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany.
² Chair of Microfluidics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Marine Technology, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany.

Abstract

Critical size bone defects are regularly treated by auto- and allograft transplantation. However, such treatments require to harvest bone from patient donor sites, with often limited tissue availability or risk of donor site morbidity. Not requiring bone donation, three-dimensionally (3D) printed implants and biomaterial-based tissue engineering (TE) strategies promise to be the next generation therapies for bone regeneration. We present here polylactic acid (PLA)-bioactive glass (BG) composite scaffolds manufactured by fused deposition modeling (FDM), involving the fabrication of PLA-BG composite filaments which are used to 3D print controlled open-porous and osteoinductive scaffolds. We demonstrated the printability of PLA-BG filaments as well as the bioactivity and cytocompatibility of PLA-BG scaffolds using pre-osteoblast MC3T3E1 cells. Gene expression analyses indicated the beneficial impact of BG inclusions in FDM scaffolds regarding osteoinduction, as BG inclusions lead to increased osteogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem cells in comparison to pristine PLA. Our findings confirm that FDM is a convenient additive manufacturing technology to develop PLA-BG composite scaffolds suitable for bone tissue engineering.

Keywords: 3D printing; 3D printing filaments; bioactive glass; bone tissue engineering; fused deposition modeling; polymer ceramic composites.