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Volume 7, Issue 2 (Suppl) J Biotechnol Biomater
ISSN: 2155-952X JBTBM, an open access journal Biomaterials 2017
March 27-28, 2017
2nd Annual Conference and Expo on
March 27-28, 2017 Madrid, Spain
Tailoring microenvironments for in situ regeneration
Elisabeth Engel1,2,4, Aitor Sánchez1, Miguel A Mateos1,2 , J C Rodríguez Cabello2,3 and Matilde Alonso2,3
1Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Spain
2CIBER-BBN, Spain
3University of Valladolid, Spain
4Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
At present, tissue engineering for bone regeneration seeks to obtain scaffolds that mimic the cell microenvironment to recruit stem
and progenitor cells to recapitulate the development of target tissues. Herein, we have explored the use of citric acid related to
bone nanostructure andmechanical performance, to develop scaffolds resembling the extracellular matrix of developing bone. Elastin-
like recombinamers (ELRs) hydrogels were achieved through a one-step chemical crosslinking reaction with citric acid, a molecule
currently considered to be essential for the proper performance of bone tissue. We were able to control the architecture and stiffness
of citric acid-crosslinked hydrogels while preserving the integrity of adhesion sequences in ELRs. Interestingly, the use of citric acid
conferred so-produced hydrogels the ability to nucleate calcium phosphate. In vivo implantation of both mechanically-tailored and
non-tailored citric acid-crosslinked hydrogels demonstrated to be able to mineralize the new formed tissue and to integrate into bone
in critical size defects in mouse calvaria. Both types of hydrogels showed bone tissue formation by intramembranous ossification. The
non-mechanically tailored scaffold showed higher cellular activity (in terms of osteoblasts and osteoclasts presence) related to a lower
density of the matrices that allowed higher cell penetration.
Biography
Elisabeth Engel is an Associate Professor at Technical University of Catalonia since 2010. She received her PhD in 2003 in Bone Metabolism Diseases from
a Medical School. She was appointed as PI at the Group of Biomaterials for Regenerative Therapies since September, 2012 at the Institute for Bioengineering of
Catalonia. Her research interests include the preparation and design of materials and scaffolds for in vitro and in vivo fundamental studies, and a further focus is
the provision of useful tools to assess mechanisms that govern cell behaviour in regenerative medicine.
Elisabeth Engel et al, J Biotechnol Biomater 2017, 7:2 (Suppl)