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Mesoporous silica monoliths containing arrays of aligned macropores oriented perpendicular to their surfaces were prepared by non-destructive imprinting of sol/gels with polymer nanorod arrays. Crack-free monoliths with areas of up to 2.5 cm2 were obtained by a combination of slow drying under ambient conditions and optimized freeze-drying.

Biodegradable extracellular matrices (ECMs) consisting of mechanically stable arrays of aligned poly(lactide) nanorods (nanorod diameter ≈ 200 nm; lattice constant ≈ 500 nm) with areas up to 9 cm2 were prepared by nondestructive extraction from recyclable self-ordered nanoporous alumina hard templates. Fibroblasts formed dense tissue layers on the heparin/gelatin activated nanorod arrays, showed excellent adhesion and exhibited a highly elongated morphology such as in natural tissue. The synthetic approach reported here combining advantages of top-down lithography (well-defined topography) and self-assembly (low costs, high throughput, feature size in the 100 nm range) may yield ECMs for biomedical applications. Remarkably, on microrod arrays with four times larger feature sizes the fibroblasts were significantly less elongated and their proliferation was strongly reduced.