Small molecule functional groups for the controlled differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells encapsulated in poly(ethylene glycol) hydrogels

By D. Benoit, Michael P. Schwartz, Andrew R. Durney, K. Anseth. Nature Materials, 2008

789 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cell-matrix interactions play critical roles in regeneration, development, and disease. The work presented here demonstrates that encapsulated human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) can be induced to differentiate down osteogenic and adipogenic pathways by controlling their 3D environment using tethered small molecule chemical functional groups. Hydrogels were formed using sufficiently low concentrations of tether molecules to maintain constant physical characteristics, encapsulation of hMSCs in 3D prevented changes in cell morphology, and hMSCs were shown to differentiate in normal growth media, indicating that the small-molecule functional groups induced differentiation. To our knowledge, this is the first example where synthetic matrices are shown to control induction of multiple hMSC lineages purely through interactions with small molecule chemical functional groups tethered to the hydrogel material. Strategies utilizing simple chemistry to control complex biological processes would be particularly are powerful as they could make production of therapeutic materials simpler, cheaper, and more easily controlled.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bffd0b7469925f2548b67bb5b8be1568789245b

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Citations in the corpus

Nanoscale surfaces for the long-term maintenance of mesenchymal stem cell phenotype and multipotency. (2011, background): “, and addition of small functional groups such as amin”
Harnessing Traction-Mediated Manipulation of the Cell-Matrix Interface to Control Stem Cell Fate (2010, result): “This finding is consistent with recent work using other hydrogels with nanometre-scale pore sizes to encapsulate cell”
Harnessing nanotopography and integrin-matrix interactions to influence stem cell fate. (2014, background): “failure additionally plagued by increasing costs of care and donor shortages [63].”
Significance of calcium phosphate coatings for the enhancement of new bone osteogenesis--a review. (2014, background): “These physicochemical characteristics can be manipulated to promote the clinical integration of implants with the surrounding cells and tissue [195, 207, 213-224].”
Biomaterial technology for tissue engineering applications (2009, background): “2005) of cell substrates and the surface modification of biosignalling molecules (Nagaoka et al. 2006; Benoit et al. 2008).”