Methacrylated Gellan Gum Hydrogels for Osteochondral Tissue Engineering

The aims of this ongoing work are to develop and characterize photo-crosslinked 3D hydrogel scaffolds from methacrylated gellan gum. The hydrogels will be manufactured with a rapid prototyping technique in sterile conditions and simultaneously photo-polymerization will be achieved by using UV curing technique. The new approach in this study is to employ the rapid prototyping and photo-polymerization techniques simultaneously while being possible to encapsulate the cells and/or bioactive agents, which will be performed in the future studies. The broad purpose of this work is to provide new knowledge for the research of hydrogel based-tissue engineering approaches, and in this way to contribute to the development of new generation solutions for osteochondral tissue regeneration. The authors thank the financial support of the MultiScaleHuman Project (Contract number: MRTN-CT-2011-289897) in the Marie Curie Actions—Initial Training Networks.