Photocurable and 3D Printable Functional Polyesters to Engineer Elastomeric Scaffolds for Biomedical Applications

Photocurable functional block copolyesters are reported to engineer elastomeric scaffolds for biomedical applications. The polymer backbone is organized by soft and stiff blocks. The functional prepolymer is readily crosslinked by thiol-yne click chemistry under ulraviolet light in the presence of a photo-initiator to form a robust elastomer. The elastomers bear both chemical crosslinks and crystal-domain crosslinks to simultaneously tune the materials' properties, such as mechanical properties and degradation rates. The dual crosslinks can more efficiently tune the mechanical properties compared to the chemical crosslink alone. More importantly, the functional prepolymer is photo-printable to construct elastomeric scaffolds with precise control of pore sizes using the state-of-the-art digital light processing technique. With hydroxyls pendant on the backbone, human umbilical vein endothelial cells prefer to grow on the elastomer surface compared to that of a poly(caprolactone) film. It is believed that these functional photo-polyesters will be useful to construct medical devices for bioengineering research.