Osteoblast adhesion and proliferation on porous chitosan/polycaprolactone scaffolds for bone tissue engineering application

Tissue engineering is an evolving technique to reduce the limitations of the bone graft. It provides diversity to improve the healing process of bone fractures and defect by combining the use of 3D scaffolds, healing promoting factors, gene therapy and different drugs. Flexibility to use a different technique to fabricate scaffolds lead to the new insight of bone healing future. A bone graft is defined as promoted bone healing through osteogenesis, osteoinduction, and osteoconduction by the implanted material alone or with other materials. Ideal bone graft depends on several factors such as biomechanical characteristic, tissue viability, the morphological structure as well as biological characteristics. In this work, we have investigated adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation of poly (epsilon-caprolactone) / chitosan scaffolds with the incorporation of hydroxyapatite and tetracycline HCl on normal human osteoblast cells. Both of the polymers were blended without a cross-linking agent to form porous scaffolds by freeze-drying technique. From the results, it was observed that the compressive modulus increased from 4.0 MPa to 12.5 MPa and the yield strength increased from 0.48 MPa to 0.75 MPa for the PCL/CS scaffold and nHA/PCL/CS scaffold, respectively. Scanning electron microscopy study revealed that the cells successfully adhered to the surface of scaffolds after 24 hours incubation. Proliferation analysis exhibited increasing trend of growth of cells. This study indicated that the scaffold fabricated using this technique was able to promote adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation of normal human osteoblast cells.