3D polycarprolactone (PCL) scaffold with hierarchical structure fabricated by a piezoelectric transducer (PZT)-assisted bioplotter

The 3D bioplotter, which is one of the rapid-prototyping systems, enables us to produce the design-based scaffolds which could control good mechanical properties and pore structures for mimicking human organs. Although the plotting system has several advantages to fabricate a variety of designed scaffolds, the main disadvantage of scaffolds fabricated by the system is that the strand surfaces are too smooth and tend to discourage initial cell attachment within the scaffolds. To overcome the problem, we suggest a new 3D plotting method supplemented by piezoelectric vibration system for fabricating scaffolds that have hierarchical surface structures, which increase the surface roughness of the scaffold without any additional chemical process. The surface-modified 3D scaffold exhibited various positive qualities including enhanced compressive modulus and improved initial cell attachment and proliferation. Cell culturing results demonstrated that the interactions between chondrocytes and the scaffold were much more favorable than those between the cells and conventionally plotted 3D scaffolds. This process provides a feasible new technique for fabricating high-quality 3D scaffolds for tissue engineering applications.