Facile Fabrication of Cross-linked Porous Chitosan Scaffolds for Cartilage Tissue Engineering

Thermally cross-linked chitosan scaffolds were fabricated and evaluated for cartilage tissue engineering applications. The lyophilized chitosan scaffolds, were cross-linked by thermal treatment simultaneously with autoclave sterilization time of 0, 10, 20 and 30min, which avoids application of traditional toxic materials. The optimum curing parameters including sterilization time, chitosan concentration and molecular weight were determined via gel content and crosslink density measurements. The results indicated at 20min of sterilization time, gel content approaches to ~80% which was considered as optimum curing time. The sterilized porous chitosan scaffolds were characterized by conventional techniques such as Compression, SEM, Porosity, Permeability and biocompatibility assay along with assessment of other biological properties using chondrocytes seeding studies.