Cytocompatibility evaluation of ferrite and NdFeB magnetic sugar particles for vasculature scaffold fabrication

Approaches in scaffold design must be able to construct appropriate porous structures to obtain desired mechanical strength and biofactor delivery. The controlled assembly of pores inside a scaffold will be very useful in the field of tissue engineering and biology. In this paper, we fabricated magnetic sugar particles (MSPs) as porogen to control pore size, pore structure and pore density in the scaffold fabrication by particulate leaching method. Also a kind of new compound material — magnetic PVA is proposed and fabricated for aligning MSPs on desired positions and improving the layout of pores. In-plane magnetizer was utilized to create a permanent magnetic field with a specific pattern over a magnetic PVA layer. After biomaterial casting and removal of the sugar template, spherical pores were generated inside scaffold. Further preliminary cytocompatibility evaluation experiments of ferrite and NdFeB MSPs in developed scaffold were conducted with human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Fluorescent micrograph of HUVECs attached on the scaffold indicates the proposed method is safe at cell cultivation level.