Dynamic culture of a thermosensitive collagen hydrogel as an extracellular matrix improves the construction of tissue-engineered peripheral nerve

摘要

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. A thermo-sensitive collagen hydrogel was used as an extracellular matrix in this study and combined with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to construct tissue-engineered peripheral nerve compos-ites in vitro. Dynamic culture was performed at an oscillating frequency of 0.5 Hz and 35° swing angle above and below the horizontal plane. The results demonstrated that bone marrow mesen-chymal stem cells formed membrane-like structures around the poly-L-lactic acid scaffolds and exhibited regular alignment on the composite surface. Collagen was used to ifll in the pores, and seeded cells adhered onto the poly-L-lactic acid ifbers. The DNA content of the bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells was higher in the composites constructed with a thermosensitive colla-gen hydrogel compared with that in collagen I scaffold controls. The cellular DNA content was also higher in the thermosensitive collagen hydrogel composites constructed with the thermo-sensitive collagen hydrogel in dynamic culture than that in static culture. These results 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 adhe-sion stage. Moreover, seeded cells were distributed throughout the material.