Thermo sensitive collagen hydrogel in dynamic culture enhances tissue-engineered peripheral nerve

Tissue engineering technologies offer new treatment strategies for the repair of peripheral nerve injury, but cell loss between seeding and adhesion to the scaffold remains inevitable.

In a study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14, 2014), a thermosensitive collagen hydrogel remained as a liquid when kept at temperatures below 10-C and gelled when the temperature was increased to 37-C in an incubator for 30 minutes, which was used as an extracellular matrix and combined with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to construct tissue-engineered peripheral nerve composites in vitro.

Results from DNA analysis and scanning electron microscope indicate that tissue-engineered composites formed with thermosensitive collagen hydrogel in dynamic culture can maintain larger numbers of seeded cells by avoiding cell loss during the initial adhesion stage; moreover, seeded cells are well-distributed throughout the material, which is of great significance for in vitro construction of tissue-engineered peripheral nerve composites.

urce: Neural Regeneration Research