Abstract
As a biomaterial, chitosan has been widely used in tissue engineering, wound healing, drug delivery, and other biomedical applications. It can be formulated in a variety of forms, such as powder, film, sphere, gel, and fiber. These features make chitosan an almost ideal biomaterial in cell culture applications, and cell cultures arguably constitute the most practical way to evaluate biocompatibility and biotoxicity. The advantages of cell cultures are that they can be performed under totally controlled environments, allow high throughput functional screening, and are less costly, as compared to other assessment methods. Chitosan can also be modified into multilayer composite by combining with other polymers and moieties to alter the properties of chitosan for particular biomedical applications. This review briefly depicts and discusses applications of chitosan and nanoparticles in cell culture, in particular, the effects of chitosan and nanoparticles on cell adhesion, cell survival, and the underlying molecular mechanisms: both stimulatory and inhibitory influences are discussed. Our aim is to update the current status of how nanoparticles can be utilized to modify the properties of chitosan to advance the art of tissue engineering by using cell cultures.
Highlights
Chitosan, produced by deacetylation of chitin, is a presumed non-toxic and hydrophilic polysaccharide (Tomihata and Ikada, 1997; Fukuda et al, 2006)
These findings indicated that the deacetylation level of chitosan is a key factor in regulating the mitogenic activity of fibroblasts and keratinocytes, but the cell responses with molecular weight differential was not clearly delineated in the report
Chen et al (2002) investigated the effects of carboxymethyl (CM)-chitosan at different concentrations (50– 500 μg/mL) and different molecular weights (3,200 Da, 15,000 Da and 35,000 Da) on normal human skin fibroblast and keloid fibroblast. They showed that CM-chitosan promoted proliferation of normal skin fibroblast significantly but inhibited proliferation of keloid fibroblast, because the CM-chitosan could decrease the ratio of type I/III collagen in keloid fibroblast by suppressing the secretion of type I collagen; but CM-chitosan had no effect on the secretion of types I and III collagen in the normal skin fibroblast
Summary
Chitosan, produced by deacetylation of chitin, is a presumed non-toxic and hydrophilic polysaccharide (Tomihata and Ikada, 1997; Fukuda et al, 2006). Nanoparticles possess unique properties, more importantly, a large surface-to-volume ratio; many of these particles possess high surface reactivity These favorable properties are being exploited in many directions in science and technology, more so recently in biomedical applications. In 2009, they found that the gold colloid/chitosan scaffold could promote adhesion and proliferation of keratinocytes (Zhang et al, 2009; Lu et al, 2010) Commercialization of these new technologies is sprouting almost as fast as they are developed, such as some of the wound dressing materials associated with nanoparticles (Rustogi et al, 2005; Ulkur et al, 2005). Our aim is to update the current status of how nanoparticles can be utilized to modify the properties of chitosan to advance the art of tissue engineering (Lai et al, 2011) by using cell cultures
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
