Enhancing cell therapies using microfluidic encapsulation strategies

细胞疗法具有修复受损组织的巨大潜力，但ALL细胞疗法面临的主要问题在于促进移植细胞的有意义的长期移植。最近，我们开发了一种新的微流控平台，将心血管祖细胞包裹在保护性的水凝胶茧中，促进细胞活力，同时改善损伤组织内的植入，并显着提高治疗效果。然而，这种治疗效果最终是短暂的，因为移植物会迅速破坏它们的保护性水凝胶微胶囊，并且通常不能在目标组织中保留超过几天，从而限制了它们的全部治疗效果。我们的愿景是通过利用细胞类型特异性生物材料的能力和使用新的微胶囊化策略来延长细胞活力，同时确保植入时组织的持久性，最终促进损伤组织的治疗性修复，从而克服这些限制。我们发现，这在细胞治疗中具有广泛的意义，特别是与早产儿慢性肺部疾病（早产的主要并发症）、肺动脉高压（PAH）的治疗和心脏损伤修复有关，在这些研究中，我们已经证明了MSCs、EPCs和EDCs在体内的保护作用。我们正在与加拿大生物技术公司Northern Therapeutics合作，以确保这项研究将广泛应用于再生医学领域，对慢性病患者有显著益处，帮助加拿大公司提高全球竞争力，并在新兴市场中刺激加拿大的经济发展。

Cell-based therapies hold tremendous potential to repair damaged tissue but the centralproblem confronting ALL cell-based therapeutics lies in promoting meaningful long-termengraftment of transplanted cells. Recently, we developed a novel microfluidic platform toencapsulate cardiovascular progenitor cells in protective hydrogel cocoons, promoting cellviability while improving engraftment within injured tissue and providing markedly improvedtherapeutic benefits. However, this therapeutic effect is ultimately ephemeral as transplantedegress their protective hydrogel microcapsules rapidly and typically fail to be retained formore than a few additional days in the targeted tissue, thus limiting their full therapeuticimpact. Our vision is to overcome these limitations by exploiting the ability of cell-type specificbiomaterials and by using novel microencapsulation strategies to extend cell viability, whileensuring tissue persistence upon engraftment, ultimately promoting therapeutic repair ofinjured tissue. With broad implications in cellular therapeutics, we have found that this isparticularly relevant to chronic lung disease of prematurity, the main complication of pretermbirth, to the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), and to cardiac injury repair,in which we have shown the protective effects of MSCs, EPCs and EDCs in vivo. We areworking with Northern Therapeutics, a Canadian biotechnology company, to ensure thisresearch will be widely applicable to the field of regenerative medicine, be of marked benefitto chronically ill patients, aide in the global competitiveness of a Canadian company, andstimulate economic development in Canada in an emerging new market.