Posted April 13, 2016

 

By Seshadri Ramkumar

 

LUBBOCK, Texas – Nonwoven substrates made using spunmelt and carding processes are cost effective to develop tissue scaffolds.

 

A team of researchers from the University of Missouri-Columbia, North Carolina State University (NCSU) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) have found that nonwoven substrates produced using traditional methods provided viable tissue scaffold medium compared to electrospun nanofiber webs.

 

Prof. Elizabeth Loboa, dean of Engineering College at the University of Missouri, undertook the study while associated with NCSU/UNC-CH with Dr. Stephen Tuin and Prof. Behnam Pourdeyhimi of The Nonwovens Institute at NCSU.

 

The electrospinning field has exploded since the early 1990s due the efforts of Dr. Jayesh Doshi, founder of Chattanooga, Tenn.-based eSpin Technologies and Prof. Darrell Reneker of the University of Akron. Many industries around the world are working to improving this method to make it scalable to produce cost-effective nanowebs.

 

Loboa and her team used carding and spunmelt technologies to develop polylactic acid scaffolds to grow human stem cells. These scaffolds showed that stem cells grown on them were healthy after three weeks and could grow into fat and bone tissues. In addition to being effective media to grow stem cells, the cost of these media is relatively cheaper to electrospun nanowebs.

 

According to Loboa, small-piece electrospun webs could cost between $2 to $5, whereas the cost of traditional media ranges between $.30 to $3.

 

According to the team, the next step is to evaluate the performance of scaffolds developed using spunmelt and carding techniques in animals in vivo.

 

Dr. Seshadri Ramkumar, Ph.D, FTA (honorary), is a professor at the Nonwovens & Advanced Materials Laboratory at Texas Tech.