Tunable Electrospun Polycaprolactone Membranes for Selective Particle Size Filtration

With the increasing need for selective blood filtration in clinical diagnosis and research, membrane-based filtration has been used in recent years as an alternative for conventional blood filtration techniques. Electrospinning offers a versatile and efficient method for building filtration membranes with tunable, and highly porous nanofibers. In this work, we developed and built electrospun polycaprolactone (PCL) membrane with a porosity of 7 µm using a 13% PCL solution (80 and 10 kDa blend) in a 1:1 DMF:THF mixture. Electrospinning parameters were tuned to reach a larger mean pore size and maintain the integrity of the fibers within the membrane. Filtration trials demonstrated a 99% efficiency for 10 µm beads, confirming the membrane's ability to retain particles larger than the mean pore size. These results highlight the potential of this membrane as a tunable alternative to conventional blood filtration methods.Clinical Relevance- This work demonstrates the ability to fabricate polycaprolactone electrospun membranes that filter out blood cells within a certain size range, offering potential advancements over traditional separation techniques for blood processing applications including plasma separation and circulating tumor cell isolation.