A Facile Strategy for Fabricating Tissue Engineering Scaffolds with Sophisticated Prevascularized Networks for Bulk Tissue Regeneration

Despite the fact that the field of tissue engineering has had considerable advances over the past two decades, a series of unsolved problems still remain. Vascularization is one of the most important factors that greatly influence the function and size of the engineered scaffolds, which limits the clinical applications. In this work, a facile extracted molding method is presented for fabricating bulk tissue scaffolds with spatial networks. Briefly, the branched templates are designed, coated with paraffin on the surface, immersed into the mixture of microbial transglutaminase and gelatin, and extracted from fully enzymatic cross-linking gelatin. The perfusion test is done and the mechanical properties of the scaffolds are investigated. Furthermore, in vitro and in vivo experiments demonstrate the nontoxicity and biocompatibility of the materials and fabrication process. Thus, this approach has great potential to overcome the challenge of rapid oxygen and nutrient delivery to engineered vascularized tissues implanted in vivo, opening the way to clinical applications.