Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine strategies represent a great challenge of translational medicine which look to make possible repairing or regenerating damaged tissues and organs by restoring their functions. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are expanding branches of translational research, based on a multidisciplinary approach involving materials science, biomechanics, cell biology, and medical sciences that combine cells, scaffolds, and growth factors with the aim to heal injured tissues and organs by development of functional repairing platforms. With the increasing aging trend of the world population, there is a growing demand for organ substitutes and regenerative medicine has the potential to meet the future needs of patients. All tissues contain a population of undifferentiated cells that are capable of self-renewal providing a reserve for injured tissue repair and replaces the cells lost daily in the lifespan, thus ensuring the maintenance of tissue homeostasis. These cells, named Adult Stem cells, are unspecialized cells which can be also isolated from neonatal tissue and are able of differentiating into different cell lineages, typical of the tissues or organs in which they reside, for this reason are considered multipotent cells. Among the different types of adult stem cells, the mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), are promising for tissue engineering and cell-based therapies due to their wide distribution in organs and the fact that can be isolated from many tissues such as the bone marrow, adipose tissue, muscle, liver, lung and extra-embryonic tissues. These multipotent stem cells have stimulated great interest in the scientific community for their immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory characteristics and since their use in clinical applications do not imply neither ethical problems nor teratoma risk formation.
Tech4Bio group, supported by external collaborations, is fruitfully working in this field, proposing new products and improving already existing biomaterials. Examples are various types of bio-stimulating films, scaffolds, substrates, supports and platforms to be used for hosting different cell lines and, subsequently, for various tissues regeneration. The most advanced materials are studied for this purpose, including bioactive functional glasses, carbon nanotubes, titanium-based bioactive coating, silicon nanowire platforms and graphene based materials. The activities span from materials design to realization of a scaffold/support satisfying all the required characteristics in terms of microstructure and mechanical properties, able to reproduce the composition and architecture of damaged tissue. Our research aims to develop novel strategies for drug/stem cell delivery and tissue regeneration using multidisciplinary approaches, including biological, chemical, physical, biomaterial and nano-biotechnological techniques. In particular, we study the effect induced by exposure to chemical and physical agents on mesenchymal stem cell differentiation and the effect of their interaction with biomaterials and nano-structured supports by the analysis of biocompatibility, cell friendly and cell differentiation response.