COLUMBIA, Mo., April 7 (UPI) -- Researchers at the University of Missouri are looking for ways to scale up the production of human tissue. Most recently, they've taken inspiration from textile manufacturing.
To create human tissues for use in a clinical setting, scientists suspend stem cells around "scaffolding" that dissolves or degrades over time and eventually leaves behind only tissue.
Currently, most scaffolding is made using a process called electrospinning, whereby non-woven materials are bonded by an elecrostatic field. The process is tedious and imprecise. For large-scale production of human tissue, researchers need a more economical approach.
"Electrospinning produces weak fibers, scaffolds that are not consistent and have pores that are too small," Elizabeth Loboa, dean of Missouri's College of Engineering, said in a press release. "We can run our system for hours and create about a ten-inch diameter of scaffold material. Therefore, we sought to test methods that could standardize the process."
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Enter carding, a method used in textile manufacturing. Carding uses rollers to separate and hold fibers as they're drawn into a web.
Researchers incorporated the technique into another fiber-production process called meltblowing, whereby fibers are pulled from a molten polymer.
Loboa and her colleagues used the new techniques to create scaffolding made out of polylactic acid. The scaffolding was used to hold collagen fillers embedded with stem cells. Tests suggest the spun scaffolding was capable of keeping stem cells healthy for at least three weeks.
The evidence -- detailed in the journal Biomedical Materials -- suggests the new techniques are cheaper and more effective than electrospinning.
"Next steps include testing how the different scaffolds created in the three methods perform once implanted in animals," said Loboa.
