Surface treatments to enhance biocompatibility for stem cell culture

6 Surface treatments to enhance biocompatibility for stem cell culture 

Thin Film Coatings for Biomaterials and Biomedical Applications 

PPy is a conductive polymer with several biomedical applications owing to its good biocompatibility and the ability of cells to attach, differentiate and proliferate on its surface [148,149]. In one study, the attachment, proliferation and differentiation of rat MSCs on PPy surfaces was shown to be comparable to those of regular tissue culture plastic surfaces [150]. The synthesis of PPy involves either electrochemical or chemical polymerization, with the admicellar polymerization technique enabling the uniform deposition of thin PPy films from a few to 100 nm thick [151]. Moreover, the attachment of cells to the PPy surface can be improved, for example, via the adsorption of fibronectin or the incorporation of Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD)-containing peptides [152]. Immobilization of the glycosaminoglycans heparin and hyaluronic acid on PPy surfaces was also shown to maintain bone marrow-derived MSC cultures and to induce differentiation successfully into mature osteoblasts [153]. 

Acrylate surfaces have also been employed for microarray stodies aimed at discovering optimal surface chemistries required for stem cell cultivation [129,163,164]. 

Using such unbiased, high-throughput approaches, 25 acrylate-based polymers were used to create 576 combinations of arrays to identify specific combinations that influenced embryonic stem cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation on a nanolitre scale [163]. 

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