Novel fabrication of OVA microcarriers for soft tissue engineering

• Main Author: Aristo Muktabar
• Other Authors: Choong Swee Neo Cleo
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials::Biomaterials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50683
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As the tissue engineering field is growing at a fast pace, improvements are always in the front line to keep up with the limitations that are yet to be addressed. Microcarriers used as injectable scaffolds for cell delivery in soft tissue engineering presents an alluring aspect of increasing patient compliance and reducing adverse response from the patient’s immune system due to its minimal invasiveness. Ovalbumin (OVA), a biopolymer found in egg white is found to be suitable material to fabricate this microcarrier thanks to its low cost, abundance and biocompatibility. A novel fabrication method involving using alginate as microcarriers mould and leaching of the alginate mould to produce porous OVA microcarriers was carried out. Subsequently comparison of morphological and thermal properties of the microcarriers was also done. The results showed that OVA microcarriers fabricated from a mixture of OVA and 3%wt Alginate solution with volume ratio of 4ml OVA to 3ml Alginate respectively and freeze dried using suspension freeze drying method are the most ideal. The OVA microcarriers above also fulfilled our requirement by having near perfect spherical shape, acceptable thermal properties, good porosity and fairly uniform pore size distribution.