Polypyrrole-Coated Electrospun PLGA Nanofibers for Neural Tissue Applications

By J. Y. Lee, C. Bashur, A. Goldstein, C. Schmidt. Biomaterials, 2009

699 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electrospinning is a promising approach to create nanofiber structures that are capable of supporting adhesion and guiding extension of neurons for nerve regeneration. Concurrently, electrical stimulation of neurons in the absence of topographical features also has been shown to guide axonal extension. Therefore, the goal of this study was to form electrically conductive nanofiber structures and to examine the combined effect of nanofiber structures and electrical stimulation. Conductive meshes were produced by growing polypyrrole (PPy) on random and aligned electrospun poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanofibers, as confirmed by scanning electron micrographs and X-ray photon spectroscopy. PPy-PLGA electrospun meshes supported the growth and differentiation of rat pheochromocytoma 12 (PC12) cells and hippocampal neurons comparable to non-coated PLGA control meshes, suggesting that PPy-PLGA may be suitable as conductive nanofibers for neuronal tissue scaffolds. Electrical stimulation studies showed that PC12 cells, stimulated with a potential of 10 mV/cm on PPy-PLGA scaffolds, exhibited 40–50% longer neurites and 40–90% more neurite formation compared to unstimulated cells on the same scaffolds. In addition, stimulation of the cells on aligned PPy-PLGA fibers resulted in longer neurites and more neurite-bearing cells than stimulation on random PPy-PLGA fibers, suggesting a combined effect of electrical stimulation and topographical guidance and the potential use of these scaffolds for neural tissue applications.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/567ab4bc83e958429e09edf2b0fc638c29dfb9d4

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Application of conductive polymers, scaffolds and electrical stimulation for nerve tissue engineering (2011, methodology): “…of PCL, PCL–gelatin, poly(L-lactic acid), PCL–collagen, PCL–chitosan, poly(lactic acid-coglycolic acid) have been used for nerve tissue engineering (Yang et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2004; Bini et al., 2006; Schnell et al., 2007; Yang et al., 2005; Murugan and Ramakrishna, 2007; Lee et al., 2009c).”
Neural tissue engineering options for peripheral nerve regeneration. (2014, methodology): “Diverse manufacturing methods, such as electrospinning [104,105], phase separation [106,107], and self-assembly [108,109], as well as computer-aided design-based fabrication techniques [19], have been used for preparing nanostructured”
Nanotopography-guided tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (2012, background): “Also the portion of neurite-bearing cells showed a similar trend, being higher in the stimulated and aligned case [233].”
Conductive polymers: towards a smart biomaterial for tissue engineering. (2014, background): “PPy was also grown on PLGA fibres, and was shown to allow the growth and differentiation of PC-12 cells and hippocampal neurons [6].”