Automated fabrication of three dimensional porous microfiber scaffolds for tissue engineering

An alternative to electrospinning, an original, simple yet effective biomaterial microfiber fabrication method is reported, in this paper, for tissue engineering fibrous scaffold fabrication. The method was discovered and proved to work as a concept without too much thought given to the automation. Though effective, it was tedious and inconsistent. Thus, an automated method based on the manual observations is developed and tested. Both methods can be used to obtain polycaprolactone microfiber scaffolds, and the automated method has a superior feature which enables easy and fast fabrication of aligned microfibers.