Electrospinning of PHAs composites filled with bioactive glass particles

The use of composite materials, especially for the development of scaffolds, is having a great impact in the biomedical field. Every day thousands of surgical procedures are performed to replace or repair tissue that has been damaged through disease or trauma. The developing field of tissue engineering (TE) aims to regenerate damaged tissues by combining cells from the body with highly porous biomaterials scaffold, which act as templates for tissue regeneration, to guide the growth of new tissue. Consequently, there are a lot of researches focused on the development of new materials that must fulfill mandatory requirements such as biocompatibility, biodegradability, bioresorbability and adequate mechanical features. Scaffolds play a key role in the field of TE, thus they provide a healthy environment for cells attachment, differentiation, proliferation, and migration. Therefore, according to the native tissue, the mechanical and physiological characteristics of the biomaterials used for scaffolding are expected to be similar. In this work, electrospun fibers will be realized by investigating an innovative composition of the homopolymer Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) and the copolymer Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV) for what regards the polymeric matrix, and the latter will be filled with bioactive glasses, in order to realize a composite material suitable for biomedical applications.