A simple, quick, and cost-effective strategy to fabricate polycaprolactone/silk fibroin nanofiber yarns for biotextile-based tissue scaffold application

The design and development of nanofibrous biotextiles have aroused much interest in the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, because they not only possess inherent textile structure and pattern, but also maintain attractive nanofibrous features. In this study, a simple, quick, and cost-effective strategy by combining conventional electrospinning technique with hand winding and stretching post-treatment was reported to manufacture nanofiber-constructed yarns (NYs). Polycaprolactone (PCL) and silk fibroin (SF) with different mass ratios were successfully processed into NYs, demonstrating the feasibility of our innovative NY-forming method. The as-generated PCL only and different PCL/SF NYs exhibited aligned nanofibrous morphology, and the nanofiber diameter was found to present obviously increased trend with increasing the SF content. The PCL/SF NYs showed significantly decreased ultimate strength, but increased Young’s modulus and failure to strain compared with the PCL NY. The PCL NY and two different PCL/SF NYs were further processed into nanofibrous textiles via the traditional textile weaving technique. The increasing of SF content was found to significantly improve the surface hydrophilicity and wettability of obtained woven nano-fabrics. The in vitro cell characterization displayed that the cells could sense the nanofibrous morphology and orientation of NYs, and further responded and re-shaped their morphology. The introduction of SF could notably promote the cell growth and proliferation. The in vivo subcutaneous embedding test showed that the autologous cells could penetrate into the porous structure of NY-based woven textiles, and increasing the SF content could apparently decrease the foreign body reaction and fibrosis of woven nano-fabrics. The present study provided a simple and feasible method that could be even performed in a common lab to fabricate PCL/SF NYs and NY-based biotextiles, and also demonstrated their great potential for the tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications.