生物化学技术

For a skeletal muscle tissue engineer, the most important issue following an experimental intervention is the evaluation of the recovery of the functional capabilities of the tissue, relative to those of the control tissue. Whether investigators perform whole muscle transfers with s ...

The disability and pain that result from damage to articular cartilage within the knee joint has stimulated the development of several approaches to facilitate the restoration of joint function (1–9). Recently, cultured autologous chondrocytes, isolated from an individual’s own ca ...

Skeletal muscle structure is regulated by many factors, including nutrition, hormones, electrical activity, and tension. The muscle cells are subjected to both passive and active mechanical forces at all stages of development, and these forces play important but poorly understood ro ...

Liver tissue has been used to study regeneration and carcinogenesis, as well as a whole array of liver-specific differentiated functions, including regulation and synthesis of blood proteins, coagulation factors, lipoproteins. The multiple homeostatic functions supported by ...

Several investigators have demonstrated that freshly harvested hepatocytes self-assemble into three-dimensional, compacted, freely suspended aggregates known as spheroids (1–3). These aggregates have smooth, undulating surfaces and average approx 120 �m in diameter. H ...

Because the cell mass in a bioartificial tissue exceeds relatively small numbers, there is a requirement to incorporate a convective transport system that provides nutrients and removes waste products. This function is provided by the vascular tree in vivo, and it may be desirable that endo ...

The cultivation of endothelial cells from large vessels, predominantly from human umbilical veins (1,2), has become a routine procedure in many laboratories and has contributed to the development of modern vascular biology. However, there is convincing evidence that microvascular ...

The culture of hematopoietic cells for cell and gene therapies is a rapidly growing area within the field of applied hematology and tissue engineering. As evidenced by recent clinical trials (1), ex vivo expanded hematopoietic cells offer great promise for the reconstitution of in vivo hema ...

Primary cells are often desirable over clonal cell lines, because they are more likely to retain the presence and activity of certain enzymes and proteins that are often lost in clones. In addition, primary cells more closely resemble the cell in the actual animal than clones do. An often-cited draw ...

From engineered tissues to transfected cell lines, the long term storage of living biologicals is desirable for a variety of medical, scientific, economic, and regulatory concerns, including transport, the expense of development, repeatability issues, and the point of use. Currently, ...

Encapsulation of cells in a membrane prior to implantation holds potential for controlling the adverse immune response that may be generated against the transplanted cells, by physically isolating the cells from the host’s immune system. If successful, encapsulation eliminates or m ...

Microencapsulation of biologically active material in the form of artificial cell was reported as early as 1964 (1–4). However, it is only in the past 10 yr that many centers have extensively developed this (5). More recently, we have concentrated on three areas of artificial cells for blood substi ...

Recent advances in tissue engineering have been facilitated by the ability to control the environment of cells in vitro. Modulation of cell-extracellular matrix, cell-substrate, and cell-cytokine interactions have proven to be useful in organotypic cultures of many kinds. In some ca ...

Objectives for dermal-epidermal skin substitutes for treatment of acute and chronic wounds include, but are not limited to: increased availability; stimulation of wound healing by transplantation of parenchymal cells; regulation of wound healing responses; and, predictable c ...

Re-epithelialization is defined as the reconstitution of cells into an organized, stratified squamous epithelium that permanently covers a wound defect and restores function (1). Following wounding, keratinocytes are activated to undergo a series of phenotypic changes that ha ...

Loss of skin because of burns or ulcers is a major medical problem, and is the impetus for the development of skin substitutes and skin replacement technologies. Efforts in this area have focused on developing suitable substitutes for the epidermis or for the dermis, as well as ways to combine both tec ...

Liver disease continues to be a challenge clinically, with 30,000 patients dying each year from liver failure (1). Although liver transplantation can successfully treat many patients undergoing liver failure, the scarcity of donor organs severely limits this treatment’s applicat ...

Most acute changes in cell activity often involve changes in activity of existing metabolic pathways either as a consequence of cell signaling changing the phosphorylation of rate-limiting proteins, or allosteric control as a consequence of changes in the environment. Long-term cha ...

Monitoring the changing levels of mRNA in cells is often used to determine if changes in protein level may relate to changes in mRNA stability or gene transcription. A commonly used technique by which this can be achieved is Northern analysis (see Chapter 29), or for low levels of mRNA, reverse transcri ...

Whereas Northern analysis is a standard procedure by which abundant levels of mRNA can be quantified and characterized by size, there is a limit to the sensitivity of this technique, even with the best probes and the use of poly(A+) mRNA enrichment (see Chapters 28 and 30). At these times, it is necessary to mo ...