@article {18788,
	title = {Production Of β-Glucan Scaffolds By Supercritical Fluids},
	booktitle = {European Meeting on Supercritical Fluids},
	year = {2016},
	month = {2016-05-11 00:00:00},
	address = {Essen, Germany},
	abstract = {<p>In the fields of medical and pharmaceutical research, aerogels are attaining great attention, both for tissue regeneration and/or drug delivery. These applications require very specific characteristics regarding porosity, strength, degradation and release of active compounds. Besides, they must be formulated from natural, non-toxic products and green processes to avoid introducing toxic substances in the human body. In this context, supercritical fluid processes offer a good alternative in the formation of aerogels, because it is possible to obtain controlled porosity and pore size at mild operating conditions with small changes of pressure and temperature. Also, these techniques do not require high quantities of organic solvents and they are easily removed when the system is decompressed. In this work, β-glucan scaffolds were produced by diverse supercritical processes: drying, foaming of hydrogels and phase inversion. β-glucans are polysaccharides which can be extracted from very different sources, such as cereals, algae or fungi, and depending on their origin, they have different structure and properties. Biopolymers are widely used for tissue engineering, however very few works study the potential of β-glucans in these applications. Barley and yeast β-glucans were chosen in this work because they could be processed by different techniques due to their different solubility in water, and thus distinct product properties were attained with each one. Characterization of the scaffolds produced by any of the aforementioned methods was performed studying their morphology by SEM (Fig. 1) and X-ray microtomography, their strength by compression tests, and their degradation rate on simulated physiological fluids.</p>},
	keywords = {aerogels, b-glucans, Drug delivery, scaffolds, supercritical fluids},
	author = {Salgado, M. and Rodr{\'\i}guez-Royo, S. and Duarte, A. R. C. and Reis, R. L. and Cocero, M. J.}
}
