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

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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.