Polysaccharide Esters for the Topochemical Design of Biointerfaces

Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are rapidly growing multidisciplinary fields that lie at the interface of medicine, engineering, and life sciences. Through a combination of biomaterial design, biomolecules, and cells, three-dimensional structures known as scaffolds are developed to recreate a suitable cell microenvironment to stimulate the repair or regeneration of a given tissue or organ. However, while it has become increasingly clear that the surface physico-chemical properties of biomaterials have an influence on cell fate and survival, there remains little to no control over these properties in produced scaffolds as well as little understanding of their underlying mechanisms. The rational and precise design of these materials will thus be crucial in gaining control over the interactions that these materials have within a cellular context, while also aiding in uncovering the molecular mechanisms involved. To this end, polysaccharides present themselves as an ideal, and underutilised, set of materials to design model surfaces for the study of cell-surface interactions. These abundant and renewable materials permit a highly tailorable chemistry, have an inherent biological compatibility, and present many structural and functional parallels to the native extracellular matrix. A patterned dextran ester platform was thus produced using a simple in-house procedure, involving the novel application of thermal nanoimprint lithography to a polysaccharide-based biological platform. The developed procedure yielded a platform with control over the synergistic properties of surface chemistry, surface roughness, and surface topography, that was suitable for the culture of bovine aortic endothelial cells. Upon patterning, the platforms displayed distinct regions of roughness, restricting cell adhesion to the smoothest surfaces, while guiding multicellular arrangements in the patterned topographies. This both suggests that a fine balance of surface properties is sufficient in controlling this behaviour, while emphasizing the importance of the combined impacts of surface properties in a biological context. The development of biomaterial interfaces through topochemical fabrication such as this could prove useful in designing functional platforms for understanding protein and cell-surface interactions. Armen Tchobanian 16.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE