Collagen Aids in Tissue Engineering
06/09/2008
SEAS Biomedical Engineering researchers have found that collagen fibers can be used to provide stability for bioengineered soft tissue grown in the lab, specifically for multiple microfabricated 3D structures. Assistant Professor Samuel Sia and Ph.D. student Brian M. Gillette discovered that construction of cell-seeded 3D hydrogels can benefit from integration with collagen, which results in a stable pattern of three-dimensional matrices.
"The specific advance we have made is to demonstrate that collagen fibers, a natural biomaterial that is a prevalent structural component in the organs of our body, can be used to anchor together soft tissues that are engineered in the laboratory," says Professor Sia. "An analogy would be that we have taken natural collagen fibers and used them as nanoropes to anchor together and stabilize different engineered biomaterials. Just as the computer industry can ‘microprocess' silicon to make sophisticated microelectronic chips, our lab is developing new methods to microprocess natural extracellular matrices for applications in tissue engineering."
In addition to providing a method to produce well-defined and stable environments for biological studies and tissue engineering, Professor Sia says this work brings closer the vision of computer-aided design of soft tissues. "The ability to design on the computer the tissue you want to grow, in the same way as you would use computer-aided design to model a building or microelectronic chips before manufacturing, and then to have the ability to reproduce that architecture as a living tissue, could produce new capabilities for basic biological studies as well as for regenerative medicine," says Professor Sia.
Professor Sia's research has been published as the cover article in the August 2008 issue of Nature Materials and is available at:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v7/n8/abs/nmat2203.html.