Polyhydroxyalkanoates are biopolyesters whose biocompatibility, biodegradability, environmental sustainability, processing versatility, and mechanical properties make them unique scaffolding polymer candidates for tissue engineering. The development of innovative biomaterials suitable for advanced Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers new opportunities for the fabrication of customizable tissue engineering scaffolds. In particular, the blending of polymers represents a useful strategy to develop AM scaffolding materials tailored to bone tissue engineering. In this study, scaffolds from polymeric blends consisting of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV) and poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) were fabricated employing a solution-extrusion AM technique, referred to as Computer-Aided Wet-Spinning (CAWS). The scaffold fibers were constituted by a biphasic system composed of a continuous PHBV matrix and a dispersed PLGA phase which established a microfibrillar morphology. The influence of the blend composition on the scaffold morphological, physicochemical, and biological properties was demonstrated by means of different characterization techniques. In particular, increasing the content of PLGA in the starting solution resulted in an increase in the pore size, the wettability, and the thermal stability of the scaffolds. Overall, in vitro biological experiments indicated the suitability of the scaffolds to support murine preosteoblast cell colonization and differentiation towards an osteoblastic phenotype, highlighting higher proliferation for scaffolds richer in PLGA.
Keywords: 3D printing; additive manufacturing; biphasic scaffolds; computer-aided wet-spinning; poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate); polyhydroxyalkanoate blends; polyhydroxyalkanoates; tissue engineering.