Congratulations to our Ph.D. student Gianni Pecorini for his book chapter entitled “Mechanical Characterization of Additive Manufactured Polymeric Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering" in the book entitled "Biomimetic Biomaterials for Tissue Regeneration and Drug Delivery". In the last decades, tissue engineering has become a promising and important field of research that is opening new perspectives for the treatment of tissue diseases or injuries.
Scaffold-guided tissue engineering involves the fabrication of 3D biodegradable polymeric structures with a porous architecture suitable for cell adhesion and proliferation, as well as the regeneration of the damaged tissue. Biodegradable polymers represent the most employed materials for the fabrication of tissue engineering scaffolds, thanks to their versatile physical-chemical properties and relatively easy processing. Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques are attracting growing interest for the fabrication of scaffolds with customized anatomical shape, overall porosity, as well as pores’ dimension and geometry. Scaffold’s morphological, mechanical, and biological properties optimization is fundamental to obtain structures that precisely mimic the properties of the target tissue and support its regeneration. In particular, scaffold mechanical properties have to be carefully tailored to avoid, for example, the early collapse of the supporting structure or stress-shielding phenomena. This book chapter presents the most important aspects involved in the mechanical characterization of biodegradable polymeric scaffolds fabricated by AM. To this purpose, common strategies employed for enhancing and tuning the mechanical properties of additive manufactured scaffolds are discussed in depth depending on the selected material(s) and the employed AM technique. Relevant experimental approaches, such as the formation of polymeric blends and composites, chemical modification of the starting materials, tailoring scaffold architecture, variation of fabrication parameters, and post-processing treatments, are accordingly overviewed by analyzing representative examples reported in literature and focused on biodegradable polymers of either natural or synthetic origin.
The work is available at the following link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-4566-2_5
