POROUS CHITOSAN-GELATIN SCAFFOLDS EMBEDDED WITH PLGA NANOPARTICLES FOR BONE REPAIR
Abstract
In the domain of tissue engineering, the repair of skeletal defects is an immediate clinical need as impaired fracture healing or nonunion bone defects often result in a functional disability for which there is no effective therapy [1].Conventional tissue engineering strategies utilize combination of biodegradable porous scaffolds and bioactive molecules such as growth factors to mimic natural processes of healing [2]. However, such approaches often produce unpredictable results, probably due to the short biological half life of bioactive molecules and lack of long term stability and tissue specificity [3]. The aim of this work is to prepare chitosan-gelatin (CH/G) scaffolds embedded with PLGA nanoparticles for the purpose of localized growth factor delivery at a pre-determined rate and to improve the therapeutic efficiency of scaffolds by mimicking the endogenous release of bioactive substance(s). Results and discussion