Infrastructure for the analysis of gene and protein expression in tissue-engineered constructs

当组织或器官受到疾病的损伤或影响时，往往会失去功能，这可能会严重影响患者的身心健康。一般来说，传统的治疗方法可能涉及广泛的手术或使用容易发生排斥反应的合成植入物，具有许多局限性。通过组织工程学，研究人员寻求创造新的组织替代品，这种替代品将整合到人体中，促进再生并恢复失去的功能。目前，世界各地的研究小组正在为人体的大多数组织开发组织工程化结构。一种常见的策略是设计一种模仿天然组织特性的支架，并在其上种植有助于再生反应的细胞。细胞播种的构建需要在实验室中进行广泛的测试，以试图了解支架环境如何影响细胞行为。理想情况下，支架将引导细胞按照它们在人体内的方式组织和行为。金斯敦总医院人类活动研究中心的研究人员目前正在开发和鉴定一些组织工程结构，特别关注软组织，如软骨或脂肪用于重建。为了更深入地了解这些结构中的细胞-材料相互作用，重要的是表征种子细胞正在表达的基因，并分析在不同实验条件下正在分泌的蛋白质。这类研究是开发支持正常细胞行为并促进再生的优化结构所必需的。这项研究是将这些组织工程策略转移到临床上的重要一步。这项赠款申请中包括的设备是进行这些基因和蛋白质表达研究所必需的。最终，使用这种设备进行的研究将对医疗保健系统产生重大好处，因为它建立了新的再生疗法，可以经济地治疗许多疾病、障碍和创伤，而不需要进行广泛的手术。

When tissues or organs become injured or affected by disease, there is often a loss of functionality, which can significantly impact a patient's physical and mental health. In general, traditional treatment methods, potentially involving extensive surgery or the use of synthetic implants that are prone to rejection, have numerous limitations. Through tissue engineering, investigators seek to create novel tissue substitutes, which will integrate into the body, promoting regeneration and restoring lost functionality. Currently, there are research groups around the world developing tissue-engineered constructs for most of the tissues in the body. One common strategy is to design a scaffold that will mimic the properties of the native tissues, and to seed it with cells that will contribute to the regenerative response. The cell-seeded constructs need to be extensively tested in the laboratory to try to understand how the scaffold environment influences the cellular behaviour. Ideally, the scaffold would direct the cells to organize and behave as they would within the human body. Researchers in the Human Mobility Research Centre at the Kingston General Hospital are currently developing and characterizing a number of tissue-engineered constructs, with a particular focus on soft tissues, such as cartilage or fat for reconstruction. To develop a much deeper understanding of the cell-material interactions in these constructs, it is important to characterize the genes that are being expressed by the seeded cells and to analyze the proteins that are being secreted under different experimental conditions. Such studies are required to develop optimized constructs that support normal cellular behaviour and will promote regeneration. This research is an important step towards transferring these tissue-engineering strategies to the clinic. The equipment included in this grant application is required for these gene and protein expression studies. Ultimately, the research conducted using this equipment will be of significant benefit to the healthcare system, by establishing novel regenerative therapies to economically treat numerous diseases, disorders, and traumas, without the need for extensive surgery.