Research

A major focus of research in the Anseth group is the development of biomaterial scaffolds with highly-controlled architectures and chemistries for three-dimensional cell culture, tissue regeneration, and biological arrays and/or assays. We are particularly interested in understanding how cells receive information from materials and what happens to cell function over time when assembled within three-dimensional microenvironments. Our approach exploits classical engineering principles and modeling, as control is required on many times scales, from seconds to months, and on many size scales, from the molecular to macroscopic. Our methods include the design of passive biomaterial niches that simply permit cells to function, as well as bioactive environments that dynamically promote or suppress specific cellular responses, including proliferation, differentiation, and extracellular matrix production. Our research spans the spectrum of fundamental studies to better understand the role of the biomaterial environment on cell function and the biology of tissue formation to targeted clinical applications in the design of in situ forming cell carriers that promote healing. Further, we use these materials to develop novel techniques to characterize and screen cell-material interactions, rapidly detect biological molecules through controlled surface chemistries, and evaluate cellular functions using high throughput microfluidic devices.

A second, defining feature of our approach is that we use photoinitiated reactions in the fabrication of biomaterial scaffolds, which enable processing under physiological conditions and, thus, scaffold formation in the presence of cells, tissues, and proteins. Photoinitiated polymerizations are readily controlled temporally and spatially, and these properties are exploited in both fundamental and applied research. Four applications that are of interest to us are: (i) creating permissive chondrocyte carriers with properties engineered for the regeneration of cartilaginous tissue, (ii) synthesizing biomaterial scaffolds that present valvular interstitial cells with a local environment that controls myofibroblast differentiation and promotes extracellular matrix production, (iii) creating cell-gel matrices laden with soluble and tethered biological signals to characterize, and eventually control, mesenchymal stem cell differentiation and (iv) functionalizing biomaterial niches with biological signals that actively modulate cell-material interactions and promote survivability of islets. Throughout these projects, we synthesize new types of multifunctional monomers that incorporate novel degradable linkages, protein and peptide functionalities, and bioactive molecules. Researchers in our laboratory come from various disciplines with backgrounds in polymer chemistry and physics, biochemistry, chemical engineering, bioengineering, molecular and cellular biology, and the clinical sciences.

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