Electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds: potentialities and applications in tissue engineering

Development of artificial scaffolds for tissue engineering is a key area of research in the regenerative medicine field. In the in vivo microenvironment, mammalian cells are surrounded by a natural fibrillar extracellular matrix whose elements are typically organized in the nanometer scale. Progresses in nanothechnologies allowed to develop biomimetic nanofibrous scaffolds that were demonstrated to play a crucial role in controlling cell migration, proliferation, differentiation, and other complex tissue functions. This presentation will focus on the design and application of nanofibrous scaffolds fabricated through the electrospinning technology, an increasingly popular process to produce non-woven textiles composed of fibres with diameters ranging from hundreds of nanometers to several tenths of microns. The great interest towards this technology arises from the simplicity of the set-up, the cost-effectiveness of the apparatus and versatility, that allows to produce electrospun materials possessing a wide range of chemical-physical properties. In addition, it is also possible to obtain fibres from polymer blends or drug-loaded and particle-loaded fibres as well as “composite” non-woven textiles by concomitantly electrospin different materials. Another interesting advantage of electrospinning is the possibility to tune mesh micro/nano-architecture - in terms of fibre dimension, fibre surface porosity and fibre orientation - by tuning process parameters. This presentation will give an overview of frontier-research on biomimetic electrospun scaffolds and will point out some of the current industrial applications, as well as future potentiality of electrospun scaffolds in the biomedical field.