CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Advances in medicine and tissue engineering promote the development of new materials, particularly bioabsorbable materials that could be used as scaffolds for skin regeneration. These materials must be suitable for cell growth and proliferation, and have to degrade in non-toxic substances once the scaffold has fulfilled its purpose [1-3]. Several polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are bioplastics produced by microorganisms that proved to be bioabsorbable [4-6]. However, they are highly hydrophobic and this is a disadvantage for cell fixation and growth. Other important point to consider is the size and interconnection of the pores since the scaffold must allow the cells to migrate, grow and keep its normal functionality. This contribution explores the effect of different plasma treatments to enhance the hydrophilicity [7-10] of compression moulded scaffolds of poly(hydroxyburyrate-co-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV), one of the better known PHAs. We changed the gas, bias voltage and temperature of the sample in order to determine the best experimental set to reduce the contact angle of a water drop settled upon the surface [11, 12]. Furthermore, we measured the ageing effect of this treatment and correlate its rate to the crystalline degree of the samples [13-15]. AFM and SEM images aid to follow the roughness changes after the plasma treatment. This is due to the rearrangement of the amorphous chains of PHBV that have high mobility (room temperature is above Tg) . On the other hand we used various leaching techniques to get different morphologies of pores and evaluate hydrophilicity and the mechanical properties of the scaffolds. Finally the influence of the gamma irradiation used for sterilization of the scaffolds is set to 25 kGy in order to sterilize the scaffolds without loosing its properties.

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