62 research outputs found
Unspooling the history of cell electrospinning
No full textThis opinion article wishes to highlight the thoughts that led to the discovery of cell electrospinning. The author will briefly highlight the advantages this technology has over its competing technologies, in particular demonstrating cell electrospinning living vessel architectures having all the primary cell types found in native vessels/arteries
Thoughts on scaffolds
No full textScaffolds are instrumental in the engineering of functional tissues, and therefore have been an intense area of interests within the regenerative biology and medicine areas of research and development. Many approaches exist for creating scaffolds with either natural or synthetic advanced materials, which are subsequently coupled with cells and other materials, and microintegrated with the aid of a bioreactor, finally forming a functional three-dimensional tissue. Although many advances have been made over the years, none of these have truly been successful as postulated by literature for either biomedical or clinical utility. For e.g. generated reconstructs, have many limitations, such as poor cell infiltration throughout the entire depth of the scaffold, to the associated cost and time for generating functional reconstructs mimicking native tissue. These and other roadblocks have truly limited the use of scaffolds as tissue engineering biomaterials/building blocks in regenerative medicine. However, these previously faced obstacles have recently been overcome with new scaffolding technologies unearthed and pioneered in 2005, which demonstrate the ability to directly handle large quantities of multiple cell types with both a biopolymer and other advanced materials for simultaneously forming a three-dimensional living reconstruct mimicking native tissues. These recently discovered platform biotechnologies will truly have significant ramifications to the engineering of a three-dimensional tissue and for regenerative medicine in general as these platforms are versatile
Reimagining Flow Cytometric Cell Sorting
No full textIn this review, a brief history of this unrivaled technology, flow cytometry, is provided, highlighting its past and present advances, with particular focus on "flow cell" technologies. Flow cytometry has truly revolutionized high-throughput single cell analysis, which has tremendous implications, from laboratory to the clinic. This technology embodies what is truly referred to as cross fertile research, merging the physical with the life sciences. This review introduces the recent notable advancements in flow cell technology. This advancement sees the complete removal of liquid sheath flow, which has advanced the technology with the possibility of both the reduction in its foot print, while also simplifying the flow cells explored in cytometry. Interestingly, the novel sheathless flow cell technology demonstrated herein has the flexibility for handling both heterogeneous cell populations and whole organisms, thus demonstrating a versatile flow cell technology for both flow cytometry and fluorescent-activated cell sorting
Cell Electrospinning: Revolutionising Cell Scaffolding for Healthcare
No full textElectrospinning is a century-old technology, which has recently found its vast applicability to many areas of research and development and its utility in industry. In the context of the life and health sciences, electrospinning for many years has been explored as a unique approach to scaffolding, on which cells are manually or through automated means seeded with cells. Unfortunately, this approach has seen little being achieved, as the voids generated between fibers within a scaffold negate cell infiltration throughout the entire scaffold. This limitation is a bottleneck for electrospinning in its true applicability to the healthcare and medical sciences
Controlled generation of microspheres incorporating extracellular matrix fibrils for three-dimensional cell culture
No full textA growing body of evidence suggests that studying cell biology in classical two‐dimensional formats, such as cell culture plasticware, results in misleading, non‐physiological findings. This paper describes the optimization of a microsphere‐based system permitting 3D cell culture incorporating physiological extracellular matrix components. Bio‐electrospraying, the most advanced method currently available, is used to produce microspheres containing THP‐1 cells as a model cell line. The bio‐electrospraying parameters of nozzle size, polymer flow rate, and voltage are systematically investigated in order to allow stable production of size‐controlled microspheres containing extracellular matrix material and human cells. The effect of bio‐electrospraying parameters, alginate type and cell concentration on cell viability are investigated using trypan blue and propidium iodide staining. Bio‐electrospraying has no effect on cell viability nor the ability of cells to proliferate. Cell viability is similarly minimally affected by encapsulation in all types of alginate tested (MVM, MVG, chemical and food‐grade). Cell density of 5 × 106 cells mL−1 within microspheres is the optimum for cell survival and proliferation. The stable generation of microspheres incorporating cells and extracellular matrix for use in a 3D cell culture will benefit study of many diverse diseases and permit investigation of cellular biology within a 3D matrix
- …
