A tool for investigating cell-material interactions: surface chemical and topographical gradients

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An understanding of the factors influencing cell-surface interactions is important in tissue engineering and the field of biomaterials. Cellular interactions with synthetic surfaces are critically dependent on surface chemistry and topography, although attempts to develop general relationships based for example on surface wettability, are often frustrated by exceptions for certain chemical functionality or cell type. It is the realisation that many cell types and surface chemistry must be sampled in order to fully characterise the factors influencing cell response to surfaces that leads us to look to a high throughput approach to this area. We propose a method to produce a large number of combinations of topographical feature size and polymeric composition on one sample. This will allow cellular response to be determined in a high throughput manner, enabling efficient development of predictive quantitative cell-surface relationships. We propose coating a gradient in topographical feature size with a plasma polymer gradient in chemistry that is oriented perpendicular to each other enabling cell response at a certain position to be correlated with the unique local combination of chemistry and topography. Successful development of this revolutionary approach will represent a major advance in the way we investigate cell interactions with surfaces and in the proposal we highlight some ways these results will be applicable in the field of tissue engineering.