A new design for electrospinner collecting device facilitates the removal of small diameter tubular scaffolds and paves the way for tissue engineering of capillaries

• Dissociating tiny tubular scaffolds from electrospinner causes unwanted crumpling or tearing.
• A new design for the electrospinner's collector has been proposed to facilitate scaffold dissociation.
• The new design is merely based on physical dissociation of a scaffold from the collector.
• The new design bypasses the need for any chemical pretreatment of the collector.

Electrospinning is a technique widely used for tissue engineering. Despite hurdles, electrospun vascular tissue scaffolds has shown great promise in in vitro studies. One problem is the removal of tubular scaffolds from a electrospinning collection device with no unwanted crumpling or tearing, especially for small diameter scaffolds. To tackle this problem we designed a collection device for simple removal of the scaffold from the collector while no chemical pretreatment was required. The scaffolds fabricated on this collecting device maintained their tubular structure and showed favorable surface properties, mechanical strength and biocompatibility. The device offers a new opportunity for tissue engineering researchers to fabricate tubular scaffolds from materials which have not been possible to date and help them improve the quality of synthesized scaffolds.