Polyester Fabrics as Tissue Scaffold

Do you remember the polyester clothes John Travolta wore in the 1983 movie “Saturday Night Fever?” If so, you may find it a little ironic that the manufacturing techniques for making those fibers have now found a new use for “Staying Alive,” in making scaffolds for tissue regeneration from stem cells. As the article referenced in this piece reports, researchers at North Carolina State University found “meltblown, spunbond and carded polylactic acid (PLA) nonwovens were evaluated as tissue engineering scaffolds using human adipose derived stem cells (hASC) and compared to electrospun nonwovens. Scaffolds were seeded with hASC and viability, proliferation, and differentiation were evaluated over the course of 3 weeks. We found that nonwovens manufactured via these industry standard, commercially relevant manufacturing techniques were capable of supporting hASC attachment, proliferation, and both adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation of hASC, making them promising candidates for commercialization and translation of nonwoven scaffold based tissue engineering strategies.”  MORE

Image Credit: Stephen Tuin and ScienceDaily.com