Unmet Need
Tissue engineering is a developing technology that has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of many types of injuries. It focuses combining cells and 3D scaffolds to restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues or whole organs. In tissue, specifically, mechanical forces have epigenetic control of developmental, remodeling, and regeneration processes. One way to create mechanical forces in tissue is magnetic actuation, which uses magnetic forces to deform the plasma membrane, causing changes in actomyosin tension levels, and promoting cytoskeleton reorganization. This can improve cell seeding efficacies, and invasion into 3D scaffolds or even enable a scaffold-free approach that bypasses any potential inflammatory response to the scaffold or its degradation product. However, traditional bioreactor systems that generate these mechanical forces in tissue are complex and use centimeter-scaled tissue samples, creating a limit to uniformly delivering nutrients and drugs to the tissue as a whole and optically observing the image of the tissue due to its high thickness. The bioreactor systems that use conventional optical imaging based on a microscope have difficulty scanning for simultaneously monitoring multiple tissues. In addition, the bioreactor systems that can provide only the tensile force of tissue using external magnetic fields have a limit to simulating various types of forces occurring in tissues in vivo, such as torsional and tensile forces acting on the skeletal muscle and the heart tissues.Thus, there is a strong need for an improved method of stimulating small-sized tissue for emulating mechanical behavior of in vivo tissue, optimal drug delivery, and high throughput.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a magnetic actuation system capable of stimulating the maturing engineered tissue. It comprises of a multiple posts array for tissue formation and actuation, an optical or magnetic-based monitoring unit for tissue observation, and a magnetic field forming unit for stimulating the tissue. It was observed that engineered tissue formed on the post array was successfully stretched and twisted by actuation motions that induced tensile and torsional forces of the post, which is magnetized by the magnetic field. It can also be a medium- and high-throughput system by applying the same magnetic field to a plurality of posts arrays and simultaneously monitoring the mechanical behavior of the tissue during magnetic actuation.
Stage of Development
Product development and performance evaluation.
Patent
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Publication
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