Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Cell-based medicine is recently attracting extensive attention as a potential therapeutic approach for various diseases.However, major hurdles have prevented their widespread application including but not limited to, the difficulty to expand stem cells while maintaining their pluripotency, dismal cell retention after implanting cells in vivo, and damage induced by the interactions between host and the implanted cells.This dissertation research is aimed to address some of these major challenges facing cellbased medicine.Inspired by the core-shell configuration of early mammalian embryos, we developed a novel coaxial electrospray technology to generate microcapsules with a hydrogel shell of alginate that mimics the zona pellucida, surrounding an aqueous liquid core of living cells in one step.Specifically, murine embryonic stem (ES) cells are encapsulated in the core while maintaining high viability.After expansion in vitro, these cells form a single aggregate in each microcapsule and maintain significantly higher pluripotency with higher capacity for cardiac differentiation than the cells conventionally cultured on 2D substrate or in the homogeneous hydrogel microbeads without a core-shell architecture.It was further found that the bioinspired core-shell microcapsule system encapsulated with cancer cells is significantly better than the conventional suspension culture in ultralow attachment plate (ULAP) for enriching cancer stem-like cells (CSCs).The time for enriching CSCs can be unprecedentedly shortened from 7-10 days to only 2 days with better CSC quality in terms of the expression of surface receptor markers, dye I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my advisor, Professor Xiaoming He, who continuously shares his wisdom, knowledge, and experience with me.During the last four years, he always encouraged and supported me in every single step I took towards conducting good research.I am lucky to have him as my mentor and I will always be motivated by his creativity and high standard as a scientist.
Author: Shuting Zhao
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Medicine
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2623512222