Magnesium incorporated chitosan based scaffolds for tissue engineering applications

Chitosan based porous scaffolds are of great interest in biomedical applications especially in tissue engineering because of their excellent biocompatibility in vivo, controllable degradation rate and tailorable mechanical properties. This paper presents a study of the fabrication and characterization of bioactive scaffolds made of chitosan (CS), carboxymethyl chitosan (CMC) and magnesium gluconate (MgG). Scaffolds were fabricated by subsequent freezing-induced phase separation and lyophilization of polyelectrolyte complexes of CS, CMC and MgG. The scaffolds possess uniform porosity with highly interconnected pores of 50–250 μm size range. Compressive strengths up to 400 kPa, and elastic moduli up to 5 MPa were obtained. The scaffolds were found to remain intact, retaining their original three-dimensional frameworks while testing in in-vitro conditions. These scaffolds exhibited no cytotoxicity to 3T3 fibroblast and osteoblast cells. These observations demonstrate the efficacy of this new approach to preparing scaffold materials suitable for tissue engineering applications.