Abstract
Tissue engineering is a promising strategy to treat tissue and organ loss or damage caused by injury or disease. During the past two decades, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have attracted a tremendous amount of interest in tissue engineering due to their multipotency and self-renewal ability. MSCs are also the most multipotent stem cells in the human adult body. However, the application of MSCs in tissue engineering is relatively limited because it is difficult to guide their differentiation toward a specific cell lineage by using traditional biochemical factors. Besides biochemical factors, the differentiation of MSCs also influenced by biophysical cues. To this end, much effort has been devoted to directing the cell lineage decisions of MSCs through adjusting the biophysical properties of biomaterials. The surface topography of the biomaterial-based scaffold can modulate the proliferation and differentiation of MSCs. Presently, the development of micro- and nano-fabrication techniques has made it possible to control the surface topography of the scaffold precisely. In this review, we highlight and discuss how the main topographical features (i.e., roughness, patterns, and porosity) are an efficient approach to control the fate of MSCs and the application of topography in tissue engineering.
Highlights
Stem cells (SCs) can differentiate into several types of cells and, as such, they have the capacity to repair injured parts of organs and tissues, holding a lot of potential in regenerative medicine.In vivo, self-renewal, proliferation, and differentiation toward a particular cell lineage, are regulated by the SCs and by their niche
They conducted a study to elucidate whether calcium ions (Ca2+), which are the central element of calcified tissues, participate in the osteoblastic differentiation promoted by the nanotubes
The results showed that while both types of scaffolds supported the tenogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), the braided constructs enhanced the upregulation tenogenesis to a greater degree than their stacked counterparts
Summary
Stem cells (SCs) can differentiate into several types of cells and, as such, they have the capacity to repair injured parts of organs and tissues, holding a lot of potential in regenerative medicine. Thanks to the advent of micro- and nanofabrication techniques, scaffolds mimicking the structural complexity of the ECM, including its specialized textured topography both at the microand nano-range, can be fabricated [17,19] Such biophysical stimuli are introduced by modifying the substrate/surface with cell-matrix interactions which will influence the mechanics of the cell cytoskeleton and, in turn, the expression of genes and proteins [20,21,22]. We discuss several prior studies regarding the application of topography to regulate the differentiation of MSCs. Different biomaterials-based scaffolds with control over the substrate roughness, patterns and porosity are evaluated in terms of their reported ability to either maintain the MSCs self-renewal abilities or to direct them to the cell lineage of choice. As a result of the abovementioned properties, MSCs have attracted a lot of attention and pre-clinical and clinical studies have already demonstrated their therapeutic value [27]
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