One-pot synthesis of macro-mesoporous bioactive glasses/polylactic acid for bone tissue engineering

The macro-mesoporous bioactive glasses/polylactic acid nanofibers were synthesized via electrospun method followed by acid treatment processing. It was identified to be an effective and simple synthetic strategy to form the uniform nanofibers about 350 nm in size. The non-ionic triblock copolymer, poly(ethylene glycol)block-poly(propylene glycol)-block-poly(ethylene glycol) (P123), was used as the template for mesoporous structure (5 nm) and the macroporous structure about 10 mu m in size derived from the overlapping of the nanofibers. Furthermore, the surface hydrophilic-hydrophobic property can be adjusted by varying the amount of mesoporous bioglass precursor (MBG-p). With the outstanding structure characters and the suitable hydrophilic property, these nanofiber composites show controlled drug release and the fast hydroxyapatite (HAP) mineralization performance. Herein, the novel materials are expected to have potential application for bone tissue engineering. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.