Electrospun human recombinant type II collagen nanofibres for articular cartilage tissue engineering

Collagen type II is the most abundant component of articular cartilage extracellular matrix. It has a major role in maintaining the physiological function of joint surfaces. Electrospinning is a method for producing sub-micron and nanofibre web, structure of which resembles the structure of natural extracellular matrix and, thus, it is potential method for production of tissue engineering materials. We used electrospinning for preparation of collagen type II containing nanofibre structures suitable for tissue engineering. Two samples were used in cell cultivation experiments. Since collagen solution had low viscosity and was not electrospinnable by itself we used polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as auxiliary polymer and obtained webs of collagen/PVA blend. Cell cultivation experiments showed that cells were growing on the surface, but did not penetrate into fibrous structure. Thus, this kind of fibre webs could be used as template for tissue engineering using two-dimensional scaffold structures.