Development of 3D-Printed PCL/ Baghdadite Nanocomposite Scaffolds for Bone Tissue Engineering Applications

A significant obstacle in bone tissue engineering is the creation of biodegradable bone replacements with the requisite mechanical and biological capabilities to treat more severe and intricately shaped injuries. Baghdadite has recently indicated that active biological ions such as silicon (Si⁴⁺) and zirconium (Zr⁴⁺) have been proven to increase bone growth considerably. In this study, we produced 3D-printed PCL-based scaffolds containing different amounts of Baghdadite using the robocasting solvent technique. Notably, PCL with 40 and 60 wt.% Baghdadite scaffolds (PB40 and PB60) promoted a more biomimetic environment for in vitro bone growth as their proper bioactivity and cell viability results were obtained without the addition of osteoinductive components. The printing process produced 3D scaffolds with a compressive strength of 7.94 MPa and elastic modulus of 29.95 MPa in PB40. According to the analytical prediction models in PB40, the elastic modulus was 24.7 and 26.89 MPa. Also, adding 60 wt.% Baghdadite increased the degradation rate to 5.1% in two months, more than six times that of PCL-based scaffolds. Cell proliferation assay demonstrated that the optical density of MG63 cells after 7 days of culture increased from 1.43 ± 0.03 to 1.82 ± 0.20 in PB40 as compared to pure PCL scaffold. Furthermore, bioactivity evaluation, ion release assessment, and morphological observation results further revealed that incorporating Baghdadite into a 3D-printed PCL-based scaffold could improve bone regeneration. Our findings demonstrate that the PCL/Baghdadite composite scaffold may be efficiently manufactured using 3D-printing technology and is extremely promising for bone tissue engineering applications.