Real bifurcated vascular grafts manufacturing for tissue engineering

Abstract

In medicine, atherosclerosis is a life threatening sickness. When stents cannot be use due to the higher narrowing of the vessel, bypass surgery has to be done. While autologous tissue is the graft of choice in most surgical bypass procedures, the next best option is the use of synthetic vascular graft. Literature has reported numerous works about electrospinning and 3D-printed vascular graft but most of the works are limited to straight and simple shapes. The generation of real complex vascular graft is still an open challenge. This work aims at designing and prototyping real bifurcated vascular grafts. 3D-printing process (FDM) was employed to create the vascular graft mould with poly-vinyl alcohol (PVA) as material. Dip coating process (DCP) was used to generate a uniform, thin, mechanically resistant and impermeable layer to ensure the blood flow. Finally, electrospinning process (EP) was employed for coating the graft with a porous and uniform layer that ensures the cell grown and then the regeneration of the autologous vessel. The present manuscript describes a novel process to obtain real bifurcated vascular grafts and analyses the effects the different process parameters have on the final dimensional accuracy of the graf