Electrospun Nanofibrous Scaffolds for Engineering Soft Connective Tissues

Tissue-engineered medical implants, such as polymeric nanofiber scaffolds, are potential alternatives to autografts and allografts, which are short in supply and carry risks of disease transmission. These scaffolds have been used to engineer various soft connective tissues such as skin, ligament, muscle, and tendon, as well as vascular and neural tissue. Bioactive versions of these materials have been produced by encapsulating molecules such as drugs and growth factors during fabrication. The fibers comprising these scaffolds can be designed to match the structure of the native extracellular matrix (ECM) closely by mimicking the dimensions of the collagen fiber bundles evident in soft connective tissues. These nanostructured implants show improved biological performance over the bulk materials in aspects of cellular infiltration and in vivo integration, and the topography of such scaffolds has been shown to dictate cellular attachment, migration, proliferation, and differentiation, which are critical steps in engineering complex functional tissues and crucial to improved biocompatibility and functional performance. Nanofiber matrices can be fabricated using a variety of techniques, including drawing, molecular self-assembly, freeze-drying, phase separation, and electrospinning. Among these processes, electrospinning has emerged as a simple, elegant, scalable, continuous, and reproducible technique to produce polymeric nanofiber matrices from solutions and their melts. We have shown the ability of this technique to be used to fabricate matrices composed of fibers from a few hundred nanometers to several microns in diameter by simply altering the polymer solution concentration. This chapter will discuss the use of the electrospinning technique in the fabrication of ECM-mimicking scaffolds. Furthermore, selected scaffolds will be seeded with primary adipose-derived stromal cells, imaged using scanning electron microscopy and confocal microscopy, and evaluated in terms of their capacity toward supporting cellular proliferation over time.