Drs. Chia-Fu Chou and Balchandar Navaneethan were awarded the <2024 Future Tech Award>
【Title】
Novel Autopilot Jet-Based Electrospinning for Fabricating Functional 3D Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Applications
【Summary】
Through optimization of simple conventional electrospinning (ES) setup, we overcome many issues posed by conventional ES and produce challenging 3D scaffolds at the human organ scale via a self-switching and self-3D searching process of autopilot single jet ES, with features of excellent shape memory, high porosity and stretchability compared with conventional multi-jets electrospun scaffolds, with these joint merits unattainable by conventional ES and commonly used 3D printing techniques.(US and ROC patents issued)
【Scientific Breakthrough】
Autopilot jet (AJ) is the first to demonstrate 3D scaffold writing, reproducibility, and can replicate patterns from as small as 1 mm to 10s cm, with a writing resolution of a few 100 µm using simple electrospinning (ES) technique. Contrarily, the conventional multi-jets ES allow for only 2D scaffold fabrication with poor writing resolution of centimeters due to random jets bending instabilities. The AJ-spun scaffolds are ~10X porous and mechanically stretchable compared to the latter.
【Industrial Applicability】
The fiber deposition by autopilot jet (AJ) requires only a basic electrospinning (ES) setup, and is predictable and tunable by field simulation. The robustness and reproducibility of the AJ-3D ES warrants the feasibility of automated 3D ES system as commercial products for academic and industrial R&D customers to make cost-effective and high-profit margin clinically relevant scaffolds for biomedical applications, The tissue engineering market is projected to be worth US$29.64 billion by 2028.
【References】
1.B. Navaneethan, G.P. Vijayakumar, L.A. Luwang, S. Karuppiah, V.J. Reddy, S. Ramakrishna, C.F. Chou*, Novel Self-directing Single-Polymer Jet Developing Layered-Like 3D Buckled Microfibrous Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Applications, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2021, 13, 9691–9701 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.0c22028.
2.B. Navaneethan, C.F. Chou*, Self-Searching Writing of Human-Organ-Scale Three-Dimensional Topographic Scaffolds with Shape Memory by Silkworm-like Electrospun Autopilot Jet, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2022, 14, 42841-42851 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.2c07682.
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