Manufacturing Porous Blocks of Nano-Composite of Needle-Like Hydroxyapatite Crystallites and Chitin for Tissue Engineering
A porous composite scaffold for tissue engineering had been developed through a novel gel-casting approach with needle-like nano hydroxyapatite (HA) crystallites and chitin. The freeze-dried nano-HA powder was firstly dispersed in the chitin solvent before chitin dissolves in its solvent completely. The composite solution was evenly mixed with a selected porosifier and poured into a mold in which it became a composite gel under the reaction of water molecules in atmosphere. Subsequently, the composite gel was subjected to the simultaneous extraction of the porosifier and chitin solvent in distilled water. After the drying process the porous composite scaffold was obtained. The morphological analysis showed that the manufactured scaffold had uniform and isotropic porous structure with controlled, fully interconnected pores. In vitro experiments indicated that the bone-like apatite layer formed easily on the walls of the porous n-HA/chitin composite scaffold.