Electroactive and nanostructured polymers as scaffold materials for neuronal and cardiac tissue engineering

Conducting polymer, polyaniline (PANI), has been studied as a novel electroactive and electrically conductive material for tissue engineering applications. The biocompatibility of the conductive polymer can be improved by (i) covalently grafting various adhesive peptides onto the surface of prefabricated conducting polymer films or into the polymer structures during the synthesis, (ii) co-electrospinning or blending with natural proteins to form conducting nanofibers or films, and (iii) preparing conducting polymers using biopolymers, such as collagen, as templates. In this paper, we mainly describe and review the approaches of covalently attaching oligopeptides to PANI and electrospinning PANI-gelatin blend nanofibers. The employment of such modified conducting polymers as substrates for enhanced cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation has been investigated with neuronal PC-12 cells and H9c2 cardiac myoblasts. For the electrospun PANI-gelatin fibers, depending on the concentrations of PANI, H9c2 cells initially displayed different morphologies on the fibrous substrates, but after one week all cultures reached confluence of similar densities and morphologies. Furthermore, we observed, that conductive PANI, when maintained in an aqueous physiologic environment, retained a significant level of electrical conductivity for at least 100 h, even though this conductivity was decreasing over time. Preliminary data show that the application of micro-current stimulates the differentiation of PC-12 cells. All the results demonstrate the potential for using PANI as an electroactive polymer in the culture of excitable cells and open the possibility of using this material as an electroactive scaffold for cardiac and/or neuronal tissue engineering applications that require biocompatibility of conductive polymers.