Highly Aligned, Interconnected Porous Scaffolds via Photopolymerization of Acrylated Epoxidized Soybean Oil...

Acrylated epoxidized soybean oil (AESO) is a bio-based, biocompatible, and biodegradable photopolymerizable resin that exhibits shape-memory behavior, making it attractive for a wide range of biomaterial applications. Despite various strategies to fabricate porous AESO scaffolds for tissue regeneration, achieving high pore interconnectivity remains challenging. Herein, we demonstrate the utility and versatility of thermoreversible terpenes as porogens in AESO to enable the formation of highly aligned and interconnected pore architectures. More specifically, a blend of 90 wt% camphene and 10 wt% camphor was employed as the terpene system, since it could be completely melted at 70 °C, uniformly mixed with liquid AESO, and subsequently crystallized at -20 °C. This process generated a bicontinuous network comprising terpene crystals and liquid AESO, thereby enabling efficient UV photopolymerization of AESO. Following terpene removal via freeze-drying, highly aligned pore networks with excellent pore interconnectivity were obtained, which are hardly achievable using conventional liquid or solid porogens. The porosity and mechanical properties of the AESO scaffolds were tuned by adjusting terpene content. Porosity increased from 61.5 to 81.5% as terpene content rose from 60 to 80 vol%. As a result, tensile strength decreased from 0.29 ± 0.045 to 0.17 ± 0.017 MPa, while elongation at break increased from 20.2 ± 4.9 to 35.5 ± 1.34%. Furthermore, this approach is compatible with vat photopolymerization (VP), a 3D printing technique. As a proof of concept, dual-scale porous AESO scaffolds, composed of unidirectional channels surrounded by highly aligned porous frameworks, were successfully fabricated. These results indicate that a variety of dual-scale porous AESO scaffolds, with greatly enhanced mechanical properties at given porosities coupled with outstanding tissue regeneration, can be produced through VP using terpene porogens, in contrast to conventional porous scaffolds comprising uniform porous frameworks.