Page 150 - Tailoring Electrospinning Techniques for Regenerative Medicine - Marc Simonet

CHAPTER 7
Figure 7.3 PLGA fibrous sca old with drug loaded CaCO3 microspheres, electrospun following the same protocol though resulting in di erent fiber morphology. On the le electrospun in winter, on the right in summer. Sca olds were produced as part of the study of J. Ma el. al.16
Studies in the past years showed that reproducibility issues with various fiber morphologies, like beads, diameter, surface and fiber fusion could be largely reduced maintaining environmental conditions, namely the relative humidity and temperature. However, while controlling ambient conditions greatly improves the reproducibility of the electrospinning process, this is not the sole solution for this challenge. Even discrete variation in equipment designs can lead to di erent electric fields. Additionally, electric fields can change during electrospinning. Deposited fibers on the target will have a shielding e ect and charges will build up on the electrospinning equipment and spun sca old. These influences are not fully
investigated yet, but they seem to have a larger e ect on the resulting fiber assemblies than on the fiber morphology.
Hence while the majority of the reproducibility issues can be resolved with constant environmental conditions and attention to details, additional investigations into charge e ects should increase the reproducibility even further.
7.3 Electrospinning; quo vadis
7.3.1 Further work in matching ECM
Despite the vast amount of research performed on electrospinning techniques for regenerative medicine there is a need to improve the resulting
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