Abstract
The significant drawbacks and lack of success associated with current methods to treat critically sized nerve defects have led to increased interest in neural tissue engineering. Conducting polymers show great promise due to their electrical properties, and in the case of polypyrrole (PPY), its cell compatibility as well. Thus, the goal of this study is to synthesize a conducting composite nerve conduit with PPY and poly(d, l-lactic acid) (PDLLA), assess its ability to support the differentiation of rat pheochromocytoma 12 (PC12) cells in vitro, and determine its ability to promote nerve regeneration in vivo. Different amounts of PPY (5%, 10%, and 15%) are used to synthesize the conduits resulting in different conductivities (5.65, 10.40, and 15.56 ms/cm, respectively). When PC12 cells are seeded on these conduits and stimulated with 100 mV for 2 h, there is a marked increase in both the percentage of neurite-bearing cells and the median neurite length as the content of PPY increased. More importantly, when the PPY/PDLLA nerve conduit was used to repair a rat sciatic nerve defect it performed similarly to the gold standard autologous graft. These promising results illustrate the potential that this PPY/PDLLA conducting composite conduit has for neural tissue engineering.