Hepatocyte culture on 3D porous scaffolds of PCL/PMCL

The development of three-dimensional (3D) porous scaffolds for soft tissue engineering mainly focused on manipulation of scaffold properties with cell behaviors. By emulsion freeze-drying method, four types of porous scaffolds were prepared from amorphous poly(4-methy-ε-caprolactone) (PMCL) and semi-crystalline poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) at different weight ratios, named as PMCL0, PMCL30, PMCL50 and PMCL70, respectively. Visual observation on cross-sectional images of the scaffolds appeared as sponge-like materials with three-dimensional and highly porous morphologies. However, the pore size, porosity and wettability of blends were not decreased linearly with increasing amorphous PMCL. Distinguished from PMCL30 or PMCL70, PMCL50 preserved intact PCL crystals distributed in amorphous matrix, resulting in the lowest Young's modulus (E) and relatively high wettability. From in vitro cell culture, it was observed that PMCL50 scaffold supported human induced hepatocytes (hiHeps) proliferation and function preservation best among all scaffolds. hiHeps on PMCL50 inclined to adopt fibroblastic morphology, whereas formed spheroidal morphology on PMCL0. It was suggested that our bare scaffolds with tailored properties have shown remarkable capability towards hiHep proliferation and function expression.