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，但在医院常规应用之前仍存在许多技术障碍。组织工程师面临的一个主要问题是，为了从小的活组织组织中制造大块组织（例如，替换某人软骨上的“洞”），他们需要从活组织组织中提取细胞，使细胞繁殖，然后让细胞产生新的、相对较大的组织。细胞增殖的标准方法不太适合这个目的。这是因为大多数组织工程中感兴趣的细胞类型只能通过在平面上生长来繁殖。当它们填满可用空间时，它们需要被移除并放置在新的表面上以继续繁殖。这个去除过程对细胞是有害的，需要大量的人力。我们最近设计并制造了一种设备，用于在高度可拉伸的表面上培养细胞。该设备提供的细胞培养表面可增加10倍。因此，在细胞生长的过程中，可以为它们提供更多的空间，而不需要将它们从表面移除。预计这将具有重要的优势，包括生产更高质量的细胞，用于改进组织工程。然而，要改善细胞和这种高度可变形的表面之间的相互作用，还有很多工作要做。该提案旨在探索优化细胞附着和生长在这些表面上的方式的几种选择，以便为组织工程生产最好的细胞。主要的方法包括对可拉伸表面进行化学修饰。因此，这项工作的结果将有助于开发一项令人兴奋的新技术，这项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学应用。

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.