Collagen-chitosan hybrid scaffolds for tissue engineering

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The use of neotissue scaffolds for the delivery and transplantation of cells to regenerate diseased or missing connective tissues is an attractive approach to improving tissue engineering and health. Compression of hyper-hydrated gels has recently been reported as a ground-breaking rapid fabrication method to accurately make three-dimensional, fibrillar collagen scaffolds having well-defined architectures and increased strength for tissue engineering. With or without cells, these represent a major shift from previous approaches in that they provide scaffolding based on the biology of extracellular matrices found in connective tissues. Strong, biopolymer-based materials reflecting physiologic tissue structure can be fabricated by compression within minutes (rather than in days or weeks) and can produce readily implantable neotissues. Compression fabrication can be applied to other hyper-hydrated gels (>95% fluid hydrogels) as a widely applicable technology by recognising that fluids are typically not a key component of the structure of reconstituted, hyper-hydrated gels; thus, its removal by compression can greatly improve the properties of implantable scaffolds.Collagen-chitosan mixtures are inherently biocompatible materials. It is anticipated that by varying the composition of protein to polysaccharide, it will be possible to control bioactivity and biodegradability as well as mechanical and ultra-structural properties. By applying the compression technique to the collagen-chitosan mixtures, a further level of control can be exerted over the matrix-to-fluid composition of the neotissue scaffolds. Compression of these hybrid scaffolds will also provide control over neotissue structure in a manner which will directly affect cell behaviour, and allow it adaptation for enhanced behaviour of environment-dependent cells.