PAPER AS SCAFFOLD FOR TISSUE ENGINEERING

Abstract

Cotton is cheap and easily available and it has been widely used as bandage material because of its higher degree of biocompatibility and non-cytotoxic nature. Cotton can be a good raw material to design scaffold for tissue engineering applications because of its fibrous structure, which can accelerate cell adhesion, growth, migration, proliferation, and differentiation of the cells. Paper scaffold can be easily surface modified by using different polymers to alter its biodegradability rate and cell attachment. In this work, we successfully fabricated paper scaffolds of different thickness using British sheet former machine. We also reported the use of fabricated paper scaffold modified with cross-linked gelatine to make biocompatible for the sustained growth of mouse macrophage cell in 2-D structure. Thus cotton based paper scaffolds can be a promising candidate for various tissue regeneration applications. Physico-chemical and mechanical properties of the prepared paper scaffold were tested using FT-IR spectroscopy, Scanning electron microscopy, H .Tensile (Frank-PTI Gmbh). Further porosity of paper scaffold was determined by Gurley densorneter. Thus in this study paper based scaffold of various thickness ranges (6011m-300Jim) with respective tensile strength range (12MPa-22.7MPa) were fabricated. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study reporting the fabrication of a paper scaffold that is biocompatible for mouse macrophage cell. So this study suggests that prepared scaffold have huge prospective as a bioactive, well-designed and economical scaffold stand for tissue engineering.