Kibet Mathew, Abebayehu Daniel
Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, United States.
Matrix Biol Plus. 2025 Mar 23;26:100172. doi: 10.1016/j.mbplus.2025.100172. eCollection 2025 Jun.
Biomaterial implants are a critical aspect of our medical therapies and biomedical research and come in various forms: stents, implantable glucose sensors, orthopedic implants, silicone implants, drug delivery systems, and tissue engineered scaffolds. Their implantation triggers a series of biological responses that often times lead to the foreign body response and subsequent fibrotic encapsulation, a dense ECM-rich capsule that isolates the biomaterial and renders it ineffective. These responses lead to the failure of biomaterials and is a major hurdle to overcome and in promoting their success. Much attention has been given to macrophage populations for the inflammatory component of these responses to biomaterials but recent work has identified an important role of T cells and their ability to modulate fibroblast activity and vice versa. In this review, we focus on T cell-fibroblast crosstalk by exploring T cell subsets, critical signaling pathways, and fibroblast populations that have been shown to dictate biomaterial-mediated fibrosis. We then highlight emerging technologies and model systems that enable new insights and avenues to T cell-fibroblast crosstalk that will improve biomaterial outcomes.
生物材料植入物是我们医学治疗和生物医学研究的关键方面,有多种形式:支架、可植入葡萄糖传感器、骨科植入物、硅酮植入物、药物递送系统和组织工程支架。它们的植入会引发一系列生物学反应,这些反应常常导致异物反应及随后的纤维化包裹,即一个富含细胞外基质的致密囊,它会隔离生物材料并使其失效。这些反应导致生物材料失效,是需要克服的主要障碍,也是促进其成功的主要障碍。巨噬细胞群体在这些对生物材料反应的炎症成分方面受到了很多关注,但最近的研究发现T细胞及其调节成纤维细胞活性的能力以及反之亦然的重要作用。在这篇综述中,我们通过探索已被证明可决定生物材料介导的纤维化的T细胞亚群、关键信号通路和成纤维细胞群体,来关注T细胞与成纤维细胞的相互作用。然后,我们强调新兴技术和模型系统,这些技术和系统能够为T细胞与成纤维细胞的相互作用提供新的见解和途径,从而改善生物材料的效果。