Alginate/chitosan hydrogel containing olfactory ectomesenchymal stem cells for sciatic nerve tissue engineering

Abstract

Regeneration and functional recovery after peripheral nerve damage still remain a significant clinical problem. In this study, alginate/chitosan (alg/chit) hydrogel was used for the transplantation of olfactory ectomesenchymal stem cells (OE‐MSCs) to promote peripheral nerve regeneration. The OE‐MSCs were isolated from olfactory mucosa biopsies and evaluated by different cell surface markers and differentiation capacity. After creating sciatic nerve injury in a rat model, OE‐MSCs were transplanted to the injured area with alg/chit hydrogel which was prepared and well‐characterized. The prepared hydrogel had the porosity of 91.3 ± 1.27%, the swelling ratio of 379% after 240 min, weight loss percentages of 80 ± 5.56% after 14 days, and good blood compatibility. The 3‐(4,5‐dimethylthiazol‐2‐yl)‐2,5‐diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay, 4′,6‐diamidino‐2‐phenylindole, and LIVE/DEAD staining were done to assay the behavior of OE‐MSCs on alg/chit hydrogel and the results confirmed that the hydrogel can provide a suitable substrate for cell survival. For functional analysis, alg/chit hydrogel with and without OE‐ MSCs was injected into a 3‐mm sciatic nerve defect of Wistar rats. The results of the sciatic functional index, hot plate latency, electrophysiological assessment, weight‐loss percentage of wet gastrocnemius muscle, and histopathological examination using hematoxylin–eosin and Luxol fast blue staining showed that utilizing alg/chit hydrogel with OE‐MSCs to the sciatic nerve defect enhance regeneration compared to the control group and hydrogel without cells.

Conductive hydrogel based on chitosan-aniline pentamer/gelatin/agarose significantly promoted motor neuron-like cells differentiation of human olfactory ecto-mesenchymal stem cells

“…In the past years, various kinds of scaffolds, such as hydrogels, nanofibers and decellularized matrices have been developed for tissue regeneration application [13,14]. Hydrogels provide a suitable porous and interconnected structure for tissue https://doi.org/10.1016/j.msec.2019.03.068 regeneration, mimicking the hydrated state of extracellular matrix [15,16]. Among possible hydrogels to be developed for tissue regeneration applications, conducting polymers are an efficient tool to control cellular behavior due to their electrical conductivity, which makes them good candidates in neural tissue engineering applications [17][18][19].…”

Alginate-chitosan PEC scaffolds: A useful tool for soft tissues cell therapy

“…Different ways of associating alginate and chitosan have been de scribed in the literature: by mixing at room (Florczyk et al, 2011;Xu et al, 2019;Lv et al, 2019) or higher temperature (Fletcher et al, 2017), bilayer (Banerjee and Ganguly, 2019) or layer by layer (Silva et al, 2017) assemblies, crosslinking (Baysal et al, 2016;Naghizadeha et al, 2018, Zhang et al, 2018, 3D printing (Liu et al, 2018), … They lead to biocompatible buildings whose mechanical properties can be variable (Francis et al, 2013;Salehi et al, 2019;Lv et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2019), even up to correspond to the mechanical properties of hard tissues Florczyk et al, 2013). In this context our strategy was to let these biopolymers chemically unmodified, in order to maintain their excellent initial biocompatibility, and to work on the process to obtain a macroporous 3D architecture with improved rheo logical properties compared with reference polymers.…”

Autophagy Modulators: Mechanistic Aspects and Drug Delivery Systems

“…As mentioned earlier, recent studies indicated that autophagy has an important role in the modulation of tumor stage and neurodegenerative disorders. Despite a great deal of investigation already in the field neurodegenerative disorders, there has recently been a marked increase in research in this area [214,215,216,217,218,219,220]. Among the main challenges in drug delivery are drug non-selective biodistribution, hydrophilicity, and cell uptake.…”