Chemically diverse polymer microarrays and high throughput surface characterisation: a method for discovery of materials for stem cell culture†Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c4bm00054dClick here for additional data file.

A D Celiz,M R Alexander,R Langer,J G W Smith,M C Davies,L E Young,C Denning,D G Anderson,D A Barrett,A K Patel

doi:10.1039/c4bm00054d

Abstract

Materials discovery provides the opportunity to identify novel materials that are tailored to complex biological environments by using combinatorial mixing of monomers to form large libraries of polymers as micro arrays. The materials discovery approach is predicated on the use of the largest chemical diversity possible, yet previous studies into human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) response to polymer microarrays have been limited to 20 or so different monomer identities in each study. Here we show that it is possible to print and assess cell adhesion of 141 different monomers in a microarray format. This provides access to the largest chemical space to date, allowing us to meet the regenerative medicine challenge to provide scalable synthetic culture ware. This study identifies new materials suitable for hPSC expansion that could not have been predicted from previous knowledge of cell-material interactions.

Highlights

The materials community has been challenged by biologists and clinicians to provide materials which are suitable for both in vitro and in vivo applications, ranging from coronary drugeluting stents to defined growth substrates for stem cell culture
The ToF-SIMS spectral data were analysed using principal component analysis (PCA), and the correlation between ToF-SIMS spectra and water contact angle (WCA) or human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) cell adhesion was analysed using partial least-squares (PLS) regression analysis as previously described.[26 580] positive and 602 negative ions were selected from a group of polymers from the array containing all 141 monomers to form the peak lists
The 15 most negative RCs displayed in Fig. 3c are most significant in describing low cell adhesion for the medium conditioned polymer library; none of these ion fragments are related to amino acids but all are characteristic of the surface chemistry of the materials that supported low cell adhesion

Summary

Introduction

The materials community has been challenged by biologists and clinicians to provide materials which are suitable for both in vitro and in vivo applications, ranging from coronary drugeluting stents to defined growth substrates for stem cell culture. The ToF-SIMS spectral data were analysed using principal component analysis (PCA), and the correlation between ToF-SIMS spectra and WCA or hPSC cell adhesion was analysed using PLS regression analysis as previously described.[26 580] positive and 602 negative ions were selected from a group of polymers from the array containing all 141 monomers to form the peak lists.

Results

Conclusion