Biomaterials
they’re seeing that, ‘Oh, I can just do this with solvents that are safe’.”
Research labs can apply to patent their findings and licence out their processes and technology to companies, or even found their own start-up to bring them to market. Mosher says either could be an option for his team, but ideally, it will be new companies who take up the green electrospinning process and manage to make it work at scale. Sometimes, a company may approach a lab and work with them to commercialise their findings – but this doesn’t happen very often, says Uyar. Even if a finding is scientifically and sustainably sound, it must be viable as a product to attract corporate investment interest.
The reality of green electrospinning involves using non- toxic solvents instead of organic ones.
submit a premarket notification (501k). The standard fee for doing so is currently $12,432. “As soon as you introduce a new solvent into the system, even if it’s a green solvent, this is a compound that the FDA needs to look at,” says Paul Dalton associate professor and head of the Dalton manufacturing and tissue engineering research lab at the University of Oregon. Going through these processes can be a drain on resources, he adds, particularly as the FDA needs to understand what happens through the full life cycle of a solvent. “The dollar costs start creeping in, and I think that’s why there’s fewer medical products from solution electrospinning,” he continues. “There’s a big appreciation that this is an issue within the biomaterials community.” Then come the practical difficulties with translating a lab process into a large-scale manufacturing one. As well as safety concerns around toxic vapour production, small-scale processes must be replicated in ways that allow for mass production. Lab work is a long way from industrial production, so workflows aren’t necessarily designed to be both efficient and commercially viable.
Mosher says his team have been approached by some manufacturers looking to make their work greener, but that they weren’t able to mimic the lab process within their own operations. While the team hopes that the information within their paper is enough for some companies to work with to develop their own processes, they are currently considering other routes for getting green electrospinning into the industry.
“The likelihood of an existing company reading [the paper] and doing it, I’d say could be around 40%,” says Mosher. “But the likelihood of new electrospinning companies [using the green electrospinning process], is a lot higher, because
110
The future of sustainable electrospinning Swapping organic for green solvents would certainly be a significant step forward, but improving the sustainability of the field is a broader and ongoing discussion. To get a truer sense of the environmental impact of electrospinning, we should look to the entire life cycle of the products we produce using this method, says Dalton. For example: one may be using a green solvent, but how much of it is required to produce the end product? How was the solvent made, and how much energy was used throughout the end-to-end production process?
This also includes weighing up the benefits of
other, newer forms of electrospinning that don’t use solutions at all, such as melt electrospinning and melt electrowriting – a process invented by Dalton Lab – which uses heat to liquefy the polymer before cooling it into a solid fibre. While these processes don’t use a solution, they do require energy to generate heat. There is yet to be a direct comparison of which is more sustainable, says Dalton.
Still, there is much to be optimistic about. Sometimes, change must happen incrementally – which can be especially true when dealing with commercial and regulatory constraints. “In the industry, we are still using organic solvents and petroleum-based materials every day,” says Uyar. “So [Mosher’s] paper, and others like it, are promising. In five years, we will be using more green solvents and more biomaterials or more materials coming from nature.”
If more electrospinning companies can use greener processes at scale, it could revolutionise the medical device industry and tissue engineering field, says Mosher. “Biofabrication is really a part of the fourth industrial revolution, with cells sitting on these fibres, laying down a matrix and regenerating tissue. It’s really blending the physical and biological world.” ●
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
MAOIKO/
Shutterstock.com
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