Hof Kevin S, Bastings Maartje M C
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Institute of Materials, Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory EPFL - STI - IMX - PBL, MXC 340, Station 12 CH-1015 Lausanne.
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Institute of Materials, Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory EPFL - STI - IMX - PBL, MXC 340, Station 12 CH-1015 Lausanne;, Email:
Chimia (Aarau). 2017 Jun 28;71(6):342-348. doi: 10.2533/chimia.2017.342.
The extracellular matrix (ECM) and cells have a reciprocal relationship, one shapes the other and vice versa. One of the main challenges of synthetic material systems for developmental cell culturing, organoid and stem cell work includes the implementation of this reciprocal nature. The largest hurdle to achieve true cell-instructive materials in biomaterials engineering is a lack of spatial and temporal control over material properties and the display of bioactive signals compared to the natural cell environment. ECM-mimicking hydrogels have been developed using a wide range of polymers, assembly and cross-linking strategies. While our synthetic toolbox is larger than nature, often our systems underperform when compared to ECM systems with natural components like Matrigel. Material properties and three-dimensional structure ill-represent the three-dimensional ECM reciprocal nature and ligand presentation is an oversimplified version of the complexity found in nature. We hypothesize that the lack of programmable control in properties and ligand presentation forms the basis of this mismatch in performance and analyze the presence of control in current state of the art ECM-mimicking systems based on covalent, supramolecular and recombinant polymers. We conclude that through combining the dynamics of supramolecular materials, robustness from covalent systems and the programmable spatial control of bio-activation in recombinant ECM materials, the optimal synthetic artificial ECM could be assembled.
细胞外基质（ECM）与细胞之间存在着相互关系，一方塑造另一方，反之亦然。用于发育细胞培养、类器官和干细胞研究的合成材料系统的主要挑战之一，包括实现这种相互关系。在生物材料工程中，要获得真正具有细胞指导性的材料，最大的障碍是与天然细胞环境相比，缺乏对材料特性以及生物活性信号展示的空间和时间控制。已经使用多种聚合物、组装和交联策略开发了模仿ECM的水凝胶。虽然我们的合成工具箱比自然界的更大，但与含有基质胶等天然成分的ECM系统相比，我们的系统往往表现不佳。材料特性和三维结构不能很好地体现三维ECM的相互关系，并且配体呈现是对自然界中发现的复杂性的过度简化版本。我们假设，在特性和配体呈现方面缺乏可编程控制是造成这种性能不匹配的基础，并基于共价、超分子和重组聚合物分析了当前最先进的模仿ECM系统中的控制情况。我们得出结论，通过结合超分子材料的动态特性、共价系统的稳健性以及重组ECM材料中生物激活的可编程空间控制，可以组装出最佳的合成人工ECM。
