Scale-up feasibility of plasma deposition in 3D tissue engineering scaffolds

组织工程领域提供了产生替代器官和组织的可能性，以应对丢失或失败，这在人类健康护理中具有明显的应用。实现这一原理的广泛应用所必须应对的众多挑战之一是在组织形成的早期阶段为细胞定位提供指导。一种常见的策略是使用合成支架支持细胞，这种支架旨在逐渐降解细胞，让细胞随着时间的推移自然产生额外的细胞基质来支持细胞。最初细胞与组织工程中常用的合成聚合物的粘附性差以及细胞进入支架中心的能力差的问题在文献中得到了广泛的报道。诺丁汉大学探索的一种方法(原理证明)是通过使用等离子体沉积对支架进行化学功能化来促进细胞黏附和进入。然而，到目前为止，沉积物从支架外围的特征渗透深度(e-折叠长度)仅约为1毫米。在这项可行性研究中，我们将尝试开发一种在单体(如烯丙胺)中击打的低压脉冲聚合等离子体，该等离子体具有必要的特征(脉冲开启和关闭时间内的等离子体参数)，以允许等离子体穿透到尺寸较小且距离较远的浇注中。这将允许从目前治疗的小规模支架盘扩大到用于软骨、骨或其他大型组织工程应用的真实世界支架。

The field of Tissue Engineering offers the possibility of generating replacement organs and tissue in response to loss or failure with obvious application in human health care.One of the many challenges that must be met to achieve wide application of this principle is the provision of guidance to cell positioning in the early stages of tissue formation. A common strategy is to support cells using synthetic scaffolds, designed to degrade gradually leaving cells supported by the extra cellular matrix that they produce naturally over time. The problem of initial poor cell adhesion to synthetic polymers commonly used in tissue engineering and poor ingress of cells into the scaffold centre has been widely reported in the literature. One method (proof-of-principle) that has been explored at Nottingham is to promote cell adhesion and ingress by chemically functionalising the scaffold using plasma deposition. However, to date the characteristic penetration depth (e-folding length) of the deposit from the scaffold periphery is only about 1 mm. In this feasibility study, we shall attempt to develop a low pressure pulsed polymerising plasma struck in monomers such as allyl amine which has the characteristics (plasma parameters in on and off time of the pulse) necessary to allow penetration of the plasma into pours of reduced dimensions and over much large distances. This will allow a scale up from small scale scaffold discs treated currently to real-world scaffolds for cartilage, bone or other large tissue engineering applications.