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theses

Tissue engineering can be broadly defined as the field of augmenting, replacing, or supplementary biological tissues. A substantial subdiscipline within this field is devoted to using manufactured regenerative therapies to treat defective body parts. In this application, therapeutic payloads, cells, and biomedical scaffolds are routinely employed to bolster the body’s regenerative processes. Unfortunately, numerous problems can arise when attempting to combine these components into a cohesive therapeutic product. Chief among these issues is the matter of scaffold fabrication conditions inducing payload denaturation and cell death, thus lowering the overall effectiveness of the therapy. In this dissertation, several strategies and approaches are detailed to address the need to better integrate therapeutic payloads, cells, and scaffolds into clinically relevant regenerative therapies. The first work delves into physically modifying scaffolds with nanomaterial coatings to augment the ability for payloads to adsorb onto the prefabricated scaffold surface. By decoupling drug loading from scaffold manufacturing, sensitive payloads are spared from contact with potentially denaturing processing conditions. Moreover, the unique physicochemical properties of nanomaterials impart enhanced drug loading capacity and controlled drug release. In the second work, biomaterials are chemically modified with bioorthogonal functional groups to produce a hydrogel that forms scaffolds under benign conditions. Labile payloads, such as proteins, are unaffected by the bioorthogonal crosslinking mechanism, which results in high bioactivity retention. Finally, the third work detailed here utilizes a combination of physically adsorbed payload-nanomaterial complexes with cells in a chemically modified scaffold. The culmination of this work are new physicochemical tools to modify scaffolds for enhanced regenerative therapies.

http://dissertations.umi.com/gsnb.rutgers:12355

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-dt8z-bc40

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