Let's get this show on the road! I'll begin.
A biomimetic three-dimensional woven composite scaffold for functional tissue engineering of cartilage
This paper describes the use of a 3-dimensional weave of biodegradable fibers that can be infused with a hydrogel (agarose is on the list of hydrogels they use!) containing cells. The woven composite has anisotropic mechanical properties similar to cartilage - more similar, at least, than agarose + cells alone.
Long-term cell survival has not yet been characterized, but short-term survival - including the vacuum-assisted process of squeezing the hydrogel into the cells, it promising. You'll note that they used the same Live/Dead assay as we discussed in lecture 4.
There are a lot of similarities here with our class projects, with the addition of the weave, and the paper demonstrates a few common experiments that we've discussed briefly in class. It also shows where you can take the relatively simple cultures we'll be making this week in lab once you finish with the course.
1 comment:
Electrospun nanofiber scaffolds generally have fibers with diameters on the order of 100-1000nm. The work in this paper has fibers that are 100X the diameter of the nanofiber scaffolds. Is this a better length scale for culturing cells? Or is this diameter size chosen mainly to provide desirable macroscopic properties (e.g. tensile strength, Young's modulus, etc.)?
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