Justin Brown

Additive manufacturing to produce vascular grafts with physiological alignment of endothelial and smooth muscle cells (Musculoskeletal Regenerative Engineering Laboratory)

General Overview of the Lab

The Brown lab focuses on two themes. First, they use cutting-edge equipment to generate scaffolds for tissue regeneration. Second, they explore basic cell biology in response to common tissue engineering scaffold architectures.

Objective/Hypothesis/Aims

This project seeks to generate unique tubular nanofiber grafts that stimulate circumferential alignment of smooth muscle cells and axial alignment of endothelial cells. the governing hypothesis being: Additive manufacturing techniques applied to electrospinning can facilitate a scaffold with fibers aligned circumferentially on the exterior and axially along the interior, these fibers will then promote appropriate smooth muscle/endothelial cell alignment.

The aims are:

1. Use electrospinning to create tubular grafts.
2. Seed smooth muscle endothelial cells on the exterior-interior of the grafts respectfully.
3. Culture vascular grafts in the flow-loop bioreactor and assess the alignment of cells in the interior and exterior of the graft.

Methods to be Used

Electrospinning with unique technology to control fiber alignment, cell culture, immunostaining, and western blotting.

Data to be Collected

Qualitative cell morphology, and quantitative protein expression characterizing both the endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells.

Analysis

Typical statistical analysis to compare quantitative data for protein expression coupled with cell size/shape analysis of images obtained with immunostaining.

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