Andrea Matelli

Visting PhD student (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy)

Bioactive glass containing 3D printed scaffolds for bone reconstruction

Supervisors in Modena (Dipartimento di Ingegneria “Enzo Ferrari”): Prof. Valeria Cannillo, Dr. Devis Bellucci

Supervisors in Erlangen: Prof. Aldo Boccaccini, Dr. Qaisar Nawaz

The advent of 3D printing technology has revolutionized tissue engineering, offering the ability to create structures tailored for tissue replacement. Notably, Fused Deposition Modeling stands as a versatile technique that allow to use composite filament to craft scaffolds with modified biological and mechanical scaffold properties beyond pure polymers [1]. The aim of this study was to fabricate filaments for high throughput FDM of PLA-Bioactive glass composite scaffolds. Moreover, the effect of novel ion-doped bioactive glass compositions on the mechanical and biological attributes of 3D-printed composite scaffolds will be evaluated. As benchmarks for this work, the well-established reference glasses 45S5 and S53P4 were selected.

[1]  Distler, T. et al., Polymer-Bioactive Glass Composite Filaments for 3D Scaffold Manufacturing by Fused Deposition Modeling: Fabrication and Characterization. Front Bioeng Biotechnol 2020, 8, 1–17, doi:10.3389/fbioe.2020.00552.