SUMMARY

Regenerative medicine combines cells, exogenous factors, and scaffolds to support cell and tissue growth to restore physiological tissue function. Supportive scaffolds play a key role in this regenerative process, and there is significant interest in enhancing performance and controlling the rate of scaffold degradation by modulating scaffold microstructure. Modeling & simulation is a powerful tool to investigate the effect of geometry on scaffold degradation, enabling rapid parameterization and design optimization without the high cost and significant time required for in vivo biodegradation studies. In this research, multi-scale modeling techniques will be developed to accurately predict the degradation of polymeric scaffolds inside the human body, including molecular dynamics simulations to examine the diffusion of water through polymeric matrices and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations with time- and location-dependent rates to examine the degradation of the scaffold and predict a final degraded state given an initial microstructure. Assisted by simulations, Structure-Property relationships will be formed to connect the initial structure to the final degraded properties, thus reducing the expensive computational time in simulation-based design. Using these relationships, initial geometric parameters can be linked to physical properties during degradation, enabling informed selection of implanted scaffold geometries based on desired scaffold lifetime and final function. This allows for the rapid exploration and screening of thousands of minute variations that could not feasibly be tested in vivo.