Preparation And In Vitro Assessment Of Chitosan Grafting Lactide/PLGA-COOH Copolymers As Biomaterials

Both chitosan and polylactide are good biocompatible polymers which are widely used in biomedical engineering,especially as scaffolds in tissue engineering.The copolymers of Iactide/PLGA-COOH and chitosan were prepared and characterized in this paper.Firstly,the trimethylsilyl-protected chitosan was prepared using chitosan as the raw material,the copolymers were synthesized by the graft copolymerization of trimethylsilyl-protected chitosan with lactide or PLGA-COOH.The structures of copolymer products were characterized with FT-IR or ~1H NMR analysis.In addition,results of DSC testing illustrated that the thermal properties of copolymers were different from single PLA and the modified chitosan;the contact angle test showed the copolymers were more hydrophilicity than single PLA.The hydrolytic degradation properties of CTS-PLGA membranes were also investigated in vitro.The degradation rate decreased with an increase of PLGA content in copolymers and could be controlled by changing PLGA content.The biocompatibility of CTS-PLGA copolymers were investigated by in vitro cell culture and mitochondrial activity assay(MTT).SEM images provided evidences of good adhesion,growth on CTS-PLGA membranes of 3T3 cells.MTT assay demonstrated a good trend of cell proliferation,giving an indication of good cell viability and biocompatibility of CTS-PLGA copolymers.Therefore,the graft copolymer has an excellent performance and biocompatibility,and made it more suitable for a novel tissue engineering scaffold.