Functionalization of high-extension surfaces for cell culture

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In recent years, the field of tissue engineering (production of artificial living tissues) has grown rapidly, but many technical barriers remain before it can be used routinely in hospitals. A major problem for tissue engineers is that in order to make large pieces of tissue from small biopsies (for example, to replace a "hole" in someone's cartilage), they need to extract cells from the biopsy, multiply the cells, and then allow the cells to produce a new, relatively large piece tissue. Standard methods for multiplying cells are not very well adapted for this purpose. This is because most types of cells of interest for tissue engineering can only be multiplied by growing them on a flat surface. When they fill up the available space, they need to be removed and placed on a new surface to continue multiplying. This removal process is damaging to cells, and requires a lot of manpower. We recently designed and built a device for culturing cells on highly stretchable surfaces. This device provides a cell culture surface which can be increased by 10 times. Therefore, more space can be provided to cells as they grow, without the need to remove them from the surface. This is expected to have important advantages, including the production of higher quality cells for improved tissue engineering. However, much work must still be done to improve the interactions between cells and this highly deformable surface. This proposal aims to explore several options for optimizing the ways that cells attach and grow on these surfaces, in order to produce the best possible cells for tissue engineering. The main approaches will involve chemical modifications to the stretchable surface. Results from this work will therefore contribute to the development of an exciting new technology that may revolutionize the way that people culture cells for many different biological and medical applications.