Combination of electrospun nanofibers and surface modified 3D printing for knee cartilage tissue engineering

The introduction of knee cartilage scaffold production and its preliminary in-vitro testing is the main subject of this paper. Scaffolds are produced by a combination of electrospinning and 3D printing. The 3D printing produces high porous interconnected structure with sufficient mechanical properties. Electrospinning is an alternative technique that can be used to produce fibrous scaffolds with a structure similar to that of the extracellular matrix. These composite scaffolds have a porous structure and the diameter of the constituting fibers can be controlled from the nano to micrometer scale. Two different types of the 3D printed fibrous materials with different surface roughness, smoothness and surface porous microfibers, are presented by scanning electron images and by comparison during in-vitro testing (3T3 mouse fibroblasts, MTT assay) of cell proliferation and filling free spaces in a separate grid.