Preparation And Performance Research Of Silk Fibers/Collagen Fibers Composite Spunlace Nonwoven Scaffold Materials Used In Meniscus Tissue Engineering

Meniscus injury has been one of the most common diseases, which is predominantly caused by injuries and diseases. Knee joints will fail to normally work when meniscus injury occurs, which might further exert huge burden on joints. Incidence of meniscus injury could be as high as 60% in the elders with their age more than 60. Moreover, as ages increase, there could be associated with meniscal tears, which occur more frequently among athletes. There are approximately 1 million cases of meniscus surgeries each year in the US.It is relatively difficult for meniscal tissues to recover from damages. The most commonly used treatment is meniscectomy, which, however, is of no good effects and decreases the protection for the cartilage. With the development of tissue engineering technology, the emergence of tissue engineering scaffold makes a new way of treatment available for meniscus tissue damage repair. Based on the spunlace technique, meniscus tissue engineering scaffold has been made in this project, which involves the selection of fiber materials for its preparation, preparation techniques and related parameters, its structure and performances, as well as biological assessment of it. All the above mentioned aspects have been comprehensively explored and analyzed, which are concretely introduced as follows.(1) Collagenous fibers and silk fibers are blended in this project so as to analyze the performances of the mixture from the perspective of morphology, structure, mechanical properties and so on. It is demonstrated that the recombination of collagenous fibers and silk fibers can significantly promote the entanglement in the process of Carding and Spunlacing, which will to larger degree simulate the performances of the scaffold on the extracellular matrix after the scaffold has been well made.(2) Scaffold materials are prepared by blending the collagenous fibers and silk fibers with different proportions. Conclusions are made by studying the uniformity, tensile compression performance, porosity and pore diameter distribution, hydrophilicity, and total protein content of the scaffold materials with different blending proportions that the optimal scaffold materials should be made of tissue engineering materials with 25% silk fibers and 75% collagenous fibers.(3) By analyzing the influence of Spunlace pressure, number of Spunlace times and the web gram weight on the pore diameter distribution and porosity through orthogonal experiments, it is ultimately identified that appropriate parameters should be: the web gram weight of 200 g?m-2, the Spunlace pressure of 6 MPa, the Spunlace times of 6, the Spunlace distance of 20 mm, the web forming rate of 2m/min and the water needle plate type of φ0.1-864 H.(4) MTT method and confocal microscope observation method are utilized to evaluate the biocompatibility of materials. Through implanting L929 mechanocyte on the tissue engineering scaffold materials, results of which demonstrate that scaffold materials have good biocompatibility and that composite scaffolds can promote the proliferation of L929 mechanocyte.