Optimized Electrospinnability and Chemical Crosslinking of Nanofiber Membranes with High-content Hyaluronic Acid for Anti-coagulant Application

Hyaluronic acid (HA)-based nanofibers have been widely used for various biomedical applications such as cosmetics, wound dressing, and tissue engineering scaffolds owing to their large active surface areas and high water retention capability. However, HA-only solutions are relatively difficult to handle for electrospinning because of their limited stability and/or solvent toxicity, while the selection of a carrier polymer is not straightforward due to poor electrospinnability. Herein, we report on the optimization of the precursor solution composition for reliable electrospinning of polymer blend nanofibers with high HA contents. Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) was selected as a carrier polymer due to its higher solubility in water, while citric acid (CA) was introduced as crosslinker to maintain the water stability of the resultant nanofibers. Thermally induced esterification was performed to interconnect PVA, HA and CA without additional catalysts and the average diameter and swelling ratio of crosslinked PVA-CA-HA nanofibers were systematically studied. To optimize electrospinnability, a mixture of water and DMF was employed as co-solvent considering that the addition of DMF increases the viscosity of the precursor solution, leading to the uniform formation of PVA-CA-HA blend nanofibers, particularly, with high HA contents (~ 16%). Finally, PVA-CA-HA nanofiber membranes were tested for cell viability and anti-coagulation characteristic to demonstrate the versatility of PVA-CA-HA nanofibers in various biomedical research fields.