Fabrication and characterization of electrospinning/3D printing bone tissue engineering scaffold

Electrospinning and three-dimensional (3D) printing is widely used to fabricate bone tissue engineering scaffolds. However, cells are difficult to infiltrate into the nanoporous structure of traditional electrospun scaffolds by electrospinning, and also 3D printing techniques have the disadvantage of low print resolution. In order to solve these problems, we fabricated a 3D composite scaffold by infusing PCL/gelatin dispersed nanofibers into the meshes of PCL printing scaffold. The morphology of the composite scaffold was evaluated by a scanning electron microscope (SEM), which shows the micro-scale (100–300 μm) porous structure. The porosity of the composite scaffold is as high as 79.32 ± 8.32%. Mechanical testing results indicated that the compressive modulus of the 3D composite scaffold (30.50 ± 0.82 MPa) is significantly higher than that of the lyophilized electrospun scaffold (18.55 ± 0.56 MPa), which is attributed to the 3D printing scaffold. An in vitro study indicated that the 3D composite scaffolds have good biocompatibility. Through CCK-8 assay and fluoresce staining characterization, MC3T3-E1 cells exhibit a better proliferation and infiltration on the composite scaffold than on the PCL printing scaffold, which is due to the microporous structure of the electrospun scaffold. Altogether, these results confirm the good potential of an electrospun/3D printing composite scaffold applied to bone tissue repair.