Functionalization of high-extension surfaces for cell culture

近年来，组织工程(人工活组织的生产)领域发展迅速，但在它可以在医院常规使用之前，仍然存在许多技术障碍。组织工程师面临的一个主要问题是，为了从小活检组织中制造大片组织(例如，替换某人软骨上的一个洞)，他们需要从活检中提取细胞，增殖细胞，然后让细胞产生新的，相对较大的片状组织。标准的细胞增殖方法不能很好地适应这一目的。这是因为组织工程中感兴趣的大多数类型的细胞只能通过在平坦的表面上培养来繁殖。当它们填满可用空间时，需要取出它们并放置在新的表面上继续繁殖。但是这个去除过程对细胞是破坏的，需要大量的人力。我们最近设计并建造了一种在高度可伸展的表面上培养细胞的设备。该设备提供了一个可以扩大10倍的细胞培养表面。因此，在细胞生长时可以提供更多的空间，而不需要将它们从表面移除。这预计将具有重要的优势，包括为改进组织工程而生产更高质量的细胞。然而，仍有许多工作要做，以改善细胞与这种高度变形的表面之间的相互作用。这项提议旨在探索几种选择，以优化细胞在这些表面上附着和生长的方式，为了生产出最好的组织工程细胞，主要的方法将包括对可伸展表面进行化学修饰。因此，这项工作的结果将有助于开发一种令人兴奋的新技术，该技术可能会彻底改变人们培养细胞的方式，用于许多不同的生物和医疗应用。

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.