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Prediction of the morphological and mechanical properties of a novel scaffold for anterior cruciate ligament tissue engineering

Tissue-engineered solutions offer a good alternative to classical surgeries in the case of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. Tissue engineering is based on the culture of reparative cells into a scaffold, whose properties must meet several key requirements such as material biocompatibility, biodegradability at a rate matching that of tissue formation, mechanical properties matching those of the native tissue and high porosity to allow cell infiltration (Vunjak-Novakovic et al. 2004). In particular, a threedimensional porous structure flexible in the low range of strain but very stiff in the large range of strain is needed. The ideal properties to match include stiffness up to 200 N/mm, strain to failure of more than 20%, a minimum pore size of 200–250mm for soft tissue ingrowth and a clearly convex force–displacement (or stress–strain) response (Vieira et al. 2009). We propose a tailorable scaffold based on multilayer braided fibres made of copoly(lactic acid-co-(1-caprolactone)) (PLCL). This scaffold is highly adjustable by playing on someparameters of the custom set-up designed to process this scaffold, such as the fibres diameter, the number of layers in the structure or the pitch length of the braid, as well as by changing the lactic acid/1-caprolactone proportions in the copolymer. The objective of the present work was to predict numerically the effect of these parameters on the morphological and mechanical properties of the scaffold, in view of finding the set of parameters which permits tomatch the required properties for ACL reconstruction.