Speaker
Description
Bioinspired engineered microenvironments provide cells with a holistic “instructive niche” that offers the adequate entourage for cellular control both in space and time. Such approaches are important to design hierarchical constructs with applicability, for example, in tissue engineering or in the development of in vitro models for drug screening. We have been proposing strategies of combining cells and biomaterials in controlled submillimetre compartments, namely: (i) cell encapsulation in liquified capsules with thin biomaterials shells formed by polyelectrolytes complexation for the autonomous development of microtissues; (ii) soft compartments created by the combination of cells and thin micro-membranes, where the biomaterial is crumpled into the shape of miniaturised scaffolds by the traction forces of the cells. Such hybrid elements can be used as building blocks to be assemble into large constructs to produce macroscopic tissues using bottom-up tissue engineering methodologies. We demonstrated the possibility of creating hierarchical constructs based on distinct bottom-up technologies, using hydrogels as the continuous binder of these living hybrid elements. We showed that cells in the original compartments may behave depending on the original microenvironment, and independently of the external milieu.
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