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

了解影响细胞表面相互作用的因素在组织工程和生物材料领域是重要的。细胞与合成表面的相互作用严重依赖于表面化学和地形，尽管试图建立基于表面润湿性的一般关系，但往往因某些化学功能或细胞类型的例外而受挫。我们认识到，为了充分表征影响细胞对表面反应的因素，必须对许多细胞类型和表面化学进行采样，这促使我们寻求该领域的高通量方法。我们提出了一种在一个样品上产生大量地形特征尺寸和聚合物组成组合的方法。这将允许以高通量的方式确定细胞反应，从而实现预测定量细胞表面关系的有效发展。我们建议在地形特征尺寸上涂上一个梯度，化学上的等离子体聚合物梯度彼此垂直，使细胞在某一位置的反应与化学和地形的独特局部组合相关。这种革命性方法的成功开发将代表我们研究细胞与表面相互作用的方式的重大进步，在提案中，我们强调了这些结果将在组织工程领域应用的一些方面。

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.