Surface functionalization of acrylic based photocrosslinkable resin for 3D printing applications

The lim­ited num­ber of resins, avail­able for stere­olith­o­g­ra­phy ap­pli­ca­tions, is one of the key dri­vers in re­search ap­plied to rapid pro­to­typ­ing. In this work an acrylic pho­tocrosslink­able resin based on methyl methacry­late (MMA), butyl methacry­late (BMA) and poly(eth­yl­ene gly­col) dimethacry­late (PEGDA) was de­vel­oped with dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion and char­ac­ter­ized in terms of me­chan­i­cal, ther­mal and bi­o­log­i­cal be­hav­iour. Two dif­fer­ent sys­tems have been de­vel­oped us­ing dif­fer­ent amount of reagent. The in­flu­ence of every com­po­nents have been eval­u­ated on the fi­nal char­ac­ter­is­tic of the resin in or­der to op­ti­mize the fi­nal com­po­si­tion for ap­pli­ca­tions in bone tis­sue en­gi­neer­ing. The crosslinked ma­te­ri­als showed good me­chan­i­cal prop­er­ties and ther­mal sta­bil­i­ties and more­over cy­to­tox­i­c­ity test con­firms good bio­com­pat­i­bil­ity with no cy­to­toxic ef­fect on cells me­tab­o­lism. More­over two dif­fer­ent treat­ments have been pro­posed, us­ing fe­tal bovine serum (FBS) and methanol (MeOH), in or­der to im­prove cell recog­ni­tion of the sur­faces. Sam­ples threat­ened with MeOH al­low cell ad­he­sion and sur­vival, pro­mot­ing spread­ing, elon­ga­tion and fu­sion of C2C12 mus­cle my­oblast cells.