Fabrication of microfibrous PCL/MWCNTs scaffolds via melt-based electrohydrodynamic printing

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing has attracted extensive attention in tissue engineering due to its unique capacity to mimic the fibrillar organizations of the native extracellular matrix. However, it is still a challenge to incorporate functional bionanomaterials into viscous polymer melts for melt-based EHD printing. Here a melt-based EHD printing process was developed to fabricate polycaprolactone (PCL)/multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) microfibrous scaffolds. The addition of MWCNT in PCL had little effect on the stability of melt-based EHD printing and simultaneously reduced the impedance of the resultant fibrous scaffolds. EHD-printed microfibrous PCL/MWCNTs composite scaffolds possessed similar mechanical properties to that of pure PCL scaffolds and showed good cytocompatibility for cellular spreading and proliferation in vitro. The presented strategy exhibits great promise to uniformly incorporate functional bionanomaterials into EHD-printed microfibrous architectures for specific biological functions.