The effect that different biochemical reagents have on corneal cells has been evaluated and a number of reagents identified that are suitable for incorporation into our scaffolds. For example, chemicals such as ascorbic acid, retinoic acid, insulin like growth factor 1 were found to support more normal corneal stromal cell behavior while transforming growth factor beta resulted in the cell acting more like wound healing cells. The influence that the physical environment, including stiffness, topography and fluid flow, has on the cells has also been characterized and provides useful information for our scaffold design and materials selection. Substrates with a low stiffness were found to be better at maintaining epithelial progenitor cells while stiffer substrates made these cell more like mature epithelial cells. Aligned microchannels were shown to control cell orientation, migration and enhance a native corneal stromal cell type. The effect of fluid shear stress on cells was evaluated using a bioreactor system this stress was shown to improve stratification of corneal epithelial cells, which is important in generating functional, transplantable tissue.
A number of different materials processing techniques have been examined and optimized to fabricate smart scaffolds capable of supporting tissue regeneration. Scaffold suitable for corneal transplantation have been developed using biomaterials such as silk fibroin and decellularized porcine corneal tissue. Decellularized porcine corneas were successfully recellularized using human cells and evaluated ex-vivo and in-vivo. Silk fibroin was combined with retinoic acid and riboflavin to generate a biomaterial scaffold that could control the behavior of corneal stromal cells.
These results of this research has been published in peer-review journals and are available in open access repositories.
