Transforming electronic plastics into bioadaptive 3D porous construct for advanced cell culture applications

Abstract

Electronic plastics (e-plastics) are indispensable in modern society, but their low recycling rate and environmental persistence have raised significant concerns. Prevailing plastic recycling strategies are inadequate to fully capture the economic benefits inherent to e-plastics, providing limited incentives for recycling. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop innovative approaches aimed at maximizing the capture of value from e-plastics. Herein, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) from discarded keyboards was unconventionally “re-tooled” to produce highly porous bioadaptive 3D sponge-like constructs for advanced in vitro applications. The ABSponge was surface functionalized via layer-by-layer (LBL) electrostatic deposition method to generate 3D human breast, colorectal and bone cancer spheroids as a drug screening tool or adapted for co-culturing of cancer spheroids and cancer-associated-fibroblasts to emulate the complex tumor niche. Collectively, our findings reveal the promising potential of using discarded keyboards as a "waste-to-resource" feedstock for advanced in-vitro biotechnological applications, achieving waste reduction and maximizing value-capture.