Organoids are becoming widespread in drug-screening technologies but have been used sparingly for cell therapy as current approaches for producing self-organized cell clusters lack scalability or reproducibility in size and cellular organization. We introduce a method of using hydrogels as sacrificial scaffolds, which allow cells to form self-organized clusters followed by gentle release, resulting in highly reproducible multicellular structures on a large scale. We demonstrated this strategy for endothelial cells and mesenchymal stem cells to self-organize into blood-vessel units, which were injected into mice, and rapidly formed perfusing vasculature. Moreover, in a mouse model of peripheral artery disease, intramuscular injections of blood-vessel units resulted in rapid restoration of vascular perfusion within seven days. As cell therapy transforms into a new class of therapeutic modality, this simple method-by making use of the dynamic nature of hydrogels-could offer high yields of self-organized multicellular aggregates with reproducible sizes and cellular architectures.Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About The Expert
Ninna S Rossen
Priya N Anandakumaran
Rafael Zur Nieden
Kahmun Lo
Wenjie Luo
Christian Park
Chuqiao Huyan
Qinyouen Fu
Ziwei Song
Rajinder P Singh-Moon
Janice Chung
Jennifer E Goldenberg
Nirali Sampat
Tetsuhiro Harimoto
Danielle R Bajakian
Brian M Gillette
Samuel K Sia
References
PubMed