Magnesium Biodegradable Scaffolds: A Preliminary Study ^†

Bone fracturing is among the most common health issues, mostly originated from osteoporosis and traumatic fractures [1]. In 2017, bone-fractures in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands (EU 6) had an associated annual cost of €37.5 billion and a loss of 1.0 million quality-adjusted life years, revealing its huge socioeconomic impact [2].

Nowadays, an approach to treat those traumas often involves the use of permanent metallic implants, which frequently result in other complications later on. In this way, tissue engineering (TE) emerged as the most promising strategy to promote bone regeneration [3,4]. The introduction of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques in bone TE has opened the possibility of customizing scaffolds according to specific patients and defect sites [5] through the integration with medical imaging [6]. Although polymers possess good plasticity and biocompatibility, their low strength compared to bone mechanical performance, poor wettability, and aseptic inflammation risk restrict their applications in hard tissue repair [7]. Thus, the combination of polymers with metals appears as an attractive solution since they present a more similar behaviour to the native bone. Magnesium based alloys are considered as a third-generation biomaterials (bioactive, biodegradable, and bio-tolerant) for TE as they can act as temporary structures for tissue regeneration and, eventually, degrade completely in a biological medium [8].

With this work, we intend to present our preliminary studies concerning the AM of biodegradable scaffolds. For that purpose, we propose to manufacture composite scaffolds of magnesium with poly-ε-caprolactone to improve the hydrophilicity and degradation rates of the latter while also maximizing their mechanical performance.