Preparation of novel 3D porous gelatin/PVA hydrogels using alginate micro-particles

Three-dimensional porous scaffolds and their fabrication technologies play an important role in tissue engineering; porosity favors the graft integration with the host tissue, besides offering the spatial volume where deposit newly generated matrix. Porogen leaching technique has been widely used to fabricate interconnected porous structures, because it allows controlling the pore size and total porosity of the whole scaffold. However, conventional porogens are water-soluble, making very difficult the adoption of this technique with a wide range of hydrophilic polymers. In this work we developed a protocol to realize micro-porous gelatin/polyvinyl alcohol (Gel/PVA) composite hydrogels using sodium alginate micro-particles as porogen.