The human skin is an anatomical barrier which protects of body against toxins, pathogens and organisms. The loss of skin can occur for many reasons such as trauma, disease, burn or surgery. There are different ways for repairing the damaged tissue of skin such as use of allografts, autografts or xenografts as substitutes, but there are some limitations in using these substitutes such as limitation of donor sites, especially in heavily burned patients, immune rejections, pain, scarring, slow healing and infections. Now there are no models of bioengineered skin that completely replicate the uninjured skin, Natural or synthetic polymers alone cannot meet all the requirements for skin tissue engineering However, combination the properties of these two groups in a hybrid scaffold can be very promising in tissue engineering applications. The aim of this work was design and fabrication of tissue engineered skin substitutes as skin scaffolds from both biodegradable synthetic and natural polymers. In this research work, the biodegradable PLGA copolymer (75.25) was used as substrate for mechanical strength of scaffold and for improving the cell adhesion and biocompatibility, type 1 bovine collagen was used as coating on the surface of scaffolds.
Two different methods including rapid prototyping and electrospining were evaluated for fabrication of samples due to their different benefits and advantages relative to other conventional methods and the electrospining was the final choice for production. For evaluating the different properties of produced scaffolds various experiments carried out including: mechanical test for determining the tensile strength, scaning electron microscopy(SEM) for microstructure observations, degradation rate in simulated body fluid (SBF), porosimetry for determining the pores size of scaffolds, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) for evaluating the functional groups of samples and contac angle for study the hydrophilicity of surface on produced scaffolds. Cell culture results of human dermal fibroblasts (HDF) and keratinocytes revealed that cell attachment behavior was significantly enhanced; MTT evaluation was consistent with cell attachment. It seems that sufficient stability of collagen on the surface due to proper chemical bonding and cross-linking has increased the bioactivity of surface remarkably which can be promising for bioengineered skin applications.