Creativity@Home - Designer magnetic particle tagging and activation of mechano-sensitive receptors for remote control of cell signalling and behaviour

在帮助我们理解细胞如何对机械环境作出反应方面，最近的一个主要催化剂是细胞和组织工程以及再生医学领域的进展。在该领域强大的多学科框架下，我们已经能够利用组织力学来定义我们如何生长和修复组织。除此之外，我们还可以提出关于机械转导的基本问题，这使我们能够解决该领域的主要问题。寻求再生医学治疗的新疗法已经导致细胞，特别是干细胞，用于修复和替代组织。使用活细胞作为一种治疗方法提出了几个挑战；最重要的是如何控制体内的治疗细胞。在我们的实验室里，我们已经建立了2D和3D组织工程模型，这使我们能够开发再生医学的治疗方法，同时也使我们能够创建更多的生物模型来测试和理解力学在组织生物学和病理学中的作用。我们已经开发了磁性纳米颗粒为基础的策略标记细胞受体和控制细胞行为和机械转导。该项目允许我们研究新的多学科方法，用于细胞内部和外部存在的细胞机械敏感受体的特定磁颗粒标记。

A recent major catalyst in aiding us to understand how cells respond to mechanical environment has been the advances in cell and tissue engineering and the regenerative medicine field. With the strong multidisciplinary framework for this field, we have been able to advance the potential for using tissue mechanics in defining how we grow and repair tissues. Alongside this we can ask basic questions about mechanotransduction which allows us to address major questions in this field. Seeking new therapies for regenerative medicine treatments has led to the utilisation of cells, in particular stem cells, for repair and replacement tissues. The use of living cells as a therapy presents several challenges; the most focal one being how to control therapeutic cells in the body. In our lab, we have established 2D and 3D tissue engineering models which allow us to develop therapies for regenerative medicine but also enable us to create more biological models for testing and understanding the role of mechanics in tissue biology and pathology. We have developed magnetic nanoparticle based strategies for tagging cell receptors and controlling cell behaviour and mechnotransduction. This project allows us to research into new multidisciplinary methods for specific magnetic particle tagging of cell mechano-sensitive receptors present internally and externally in a cell.