Abstract:

Polyurethane has excellent mechanical property, however, pure PU is not suitable as vascular tissue engineering scaffold due to its bydrophobicity and less cells were attached on its surface. In this paper, composite polyurethane/collagen nanofibrous scaffolds with different ratio for vascular tissue engineering were prepared through electrospinning. Firstly, the morphologies, chemical and mechanical characterizations were carried out using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) respectively. Then cultured smooth muscle cells (SMCs) on nanofibrous scaffolds and evaluated the attachment and proliferation of cells using SEM. The results show that the addition of collagen decreased the diameter of nanofibers from 453 nm to 154 nm, decreased the pore diameter from 0.64μm to 0.28μm, also enhance the proliferation and attachment of cells. When the mass ratio of polyurethane and collagen is3:1, the tensile strength and biocompatibility of composite PU/Coll(3:1) scaffolds were the best, hence, more SMCs were observed on this scaffold.

Key words: composite nanofiber, electrospinning, vascular tissue engineering, polyurethane