Melt electrowriting below the critical translation speed to fabricate crimped elastomer scaffolds with non-linear extension behaviour mimicking that of ligaments and tendons
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ligaments and tendons are comprised of aligned, crimped collagen fibrils that provide tissue-specific mechanical properties with non-linear extension behaviour, exhibiting low stress at initial strain (toe region behaviour). To approximate this behaviour, we report fibrous scaffolds with sinusoidal patterns by melt electrowriting (MEW) below the critical translation speed (CTS) by exploitation of the natural flow behaviour of the polymer melt. More specifically, we synthesised photopolymerizable poly(L-lactide-co-ε-caprolactone-co-acryloyl carbonate) (p(LLA-co-ε-CL-co-AC)) and poly(ε-caprolactone-co-acryloyl carbonate) (p(ε-CL-co-AC)) by ring-opening polymerization (ROP). Single fibre (fØ = 26.8 ± 1.9 µm) tensile testing revealed a customisable toe region with Young’s Moduli ranging from E = 29 ± 17 MPa for the most crimped structures to E = 314 ± 157 MPa for straight fibres. This toe region extended to scaffolds containing multiple fibres, while the sinusoidal pattern could be influenced by printing speed. The synthesized polymers were cytocompatible and exhibited a tensile strength of σ = 26 ± 7 MPa after 104 cycles of preloading at 10% strain while retaining the distinct toe region commonly observed in native ligaments and tendon tissue. Damaged tendons and ligaments are serious and frequently occurring injuries worldwide. Recent therapies, including autologous grafts, still have severe disadvantages leading to a demand for synthetic alternatives. Materials envisioned to induce tendon and ligament regeneration should be degradable, cytocompatible and mimic the ultrastructural and mechanical properties of the native tissue. Specifically, we utilised photo-cross-linkable polymers for additive manufacturing (AM) with MEW. In this way, we were able to direct-write cytocompatible fibres of a few micrometres thickness into crimp-structured elastomer scaffolds that mimic the non-linear biomechanical behaviour of tendon and ligament tissue.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it