PRIYANKA CHAKRABORTY, AMITY UNIVERSITY KOLKATA
Magnetic field and hydrogels were used by the scientists of the Perelman School of Medicine to demonstrate a way to design complex body tissues. The idea was to engineer cartilage designing with a proper depth-dependent cell that mirrored the original cell pattern. The first result showcased magnetically unaltered cells that could be patterned into hydrogels and cultured to generate various engineered tissues.
The complication in fixing cartilage or other similar tissues is that their tissue make-up is complex. There is a natural gradient from the top to the bottom, where it contacts the bone. Superficially cartilage has high cellularity, meaning there is a higher number of cells. But where cartilage attaches to the bone, deeper inside, its cell number is low. Hence, the researchers thought to repave it rather than filling it from the inside.
With that in mind, the team concluded that if they filled the 3D hydrogel solution with a magnetic field while arranging other nonmagnetic materials like drug delivery microcapsules, into specific patterns the desired results could be obtained. Brief contact with the magnetic field will do the job and then the hydrogel was exposed to UV light in a process called “photocrosslinking” to lock everything in place. The engineered tissue maintains a cellular gradient automatically after this.
By locking the cells and drug-delivering agents in place via magnetic pattern, tissues produced better implants for cartilage repair, on the contrary, to standard synthetic materials that have been produced. This is the first successful step towards developing more efficient products in living subjects. The scientists predict that this process can be used to generate tissue implantation for cartilage defects and maybe one day it can be further extended to generate living joint planes. Having said that, the first success in this project has been wildly encouraged and acknowledged for now.
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Citation:
Hannah M. Zlotnick ,Andy T. Clark ,Sarah E. Gullbrand ,James L. Carey ,Xuemei M. Cheng ,Robert L. Mauck; Magneto‐Driven Gradients of Diamagnetic Objects for Engineering Complex Tissues, Wiley Online Library advanced material https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202005030
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