Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 12, Issue 6, 2009

Despite significant investment in tissue engineering research, few successful products have come to market. Hence, there is a need to accelerate tissue engineering research. One approach to accelerating development is combinatorial and high throughput (CHT) screening. Combinatorial approaches are utilized extensively for pharmaceutical research and their application to biomaterials development is growing. This speci Read More

Gradients and arrays have become very useful to the fields of tissue engineering and biomaterials. Both gradients and arrays make efficient platforms for screening cell response to biomaterials. Graded biomaterials also have functional applications and make useful substrates for fundamental studies of cell phenomena such as migration. This article will review the use of gradients and arrays in tissue engineering a Read More

Stem cells have great potential as cell sources for regenerative medicine due to both their self-renewal and multi-lineage differentiation capacity. Despite advances in the field of stem cell biology, major challenges remain before stem cells can be widely used for therapeutic purposes. One challenge is to develop reproducible methods to control stem cell growth and differentiation. The niche in which stem cells reside is a co Read More

The understanding of fundamental phenomena involved in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine is continuously growing and leads to the demand for three-dimensional (3D) models that better represent tissue architecture and direct cells into the proper lineage for specific tissue repair. Porous 3D scaffolds are used in tissue engineering as templates to allow cell attachment and tissue formation. Scaffold design pla Read More

Chemotaxis is essential for many biological processes. Much of our understanding of the mechanisms underlying chemotaxis is based on a variety of in vitro assays. We review these assays, dividing them into groups depending on the process used to generate the gradient. We describe how each method works, its strengths and limitations, and provide some information about the kinds of cells that have been studied with each assay.

The emphasis in the field of orthopaedic tissue engineering is on imparting biomimetic functionality to tissue engineered bone or soft tissue grafts and enabling their translation to the clinic. A significant challenge in achieving extended graft functionality is engineering the biological fixation of these grafts with each other as well as with the host environment. Biological fixation will require re-establishment of the structure-functi Read More

A recently developed technique for the measurement of cell migration on surface bound gradients was used to assay the behavior of microvascular endothelial cells on a range of fibronectin gradient slopes in the presence of soluble promoters and inhibitors of chemotaxis. Directional microvascular endothelial cell migration was shown to increase with increasing gradient slope with no significant change in c Read More

Current methods for engineering immobilized, ‘solid-phase’ growth factor patterns have not addressed the need for presentation of the growth factors in a biologically-relevant context. We developed an inkjet printing methodology for creating solid-phase patterns of unmodified growth factors on native biological material substrates. We demonstrate this approach by printing gradients of fluorescently labeled bone morp Read More

A simple and straightforward screening process to assess the toxicity and corresponding cell response of dental composites would be useful prior to extensive in vitro or in vivo characterization. To this end, gradient composite samples were prepared with variations in filler content/type and in degree of conversion (DC). The DC was determined using near infrared spectroscopy (NIR), and the surface morphology was evaluated Read More

Increasingly, combinatorial libraries are used to screen large numbers of complex chemically- and physicallypatterned polymers against cell response. There is a strong need to extract meaningful relationships between cell function and material surface features from these experiments. A novel high-throughput cell-material screening strategy, based upon local cell-feature analysis (LCFA) was applied to screen osteoblast Read More