Fluids 2018, 3(2), 25; https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids3020025
Time-Dependent Shear Stress Distributions during Extended Flow Perfusion Culture of Bone Tissue Engineered Constructs
1
Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA
2
Otto H. York Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 9 January 2018 / Revised: 23 March 2018 / Accepted: 29 March 2018 / Published: 3 April 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Flow and Heat or Mass Transfer in the Chemical Process Industry)
Abstract
Flow perfusion bioreactors have been extensively investigated as a promising culture method for bone tissue engineering, due to improved nutrient delivery and shear force-mediated osteoblastic differentiation. However, a major drawback impeding the transition to clinically-relevant tissue regeneration is the inability to non-destructively monitor constructs during culture. To alleviate this shortcoming, we investigated the distribution of fluid shear forces in scaffolds cultured in flow perfusion bioreactors using computational fluid dynamic techniques, analyzed the effects of scaffold architecture on the shear forces and monitored tissue mineralization throughout the culture period using microcomputed tomography. For this study, we dynamically seeded one million adult rat mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) on 85% porous poly(l-lactic acid) (PLLA) polymeric spunbonded scaffolds. After taking intermittent samples over 16 days, the constructs were imaged and reconstructed using microcomputed tomography. Fluid dynamic simulations were performed using a custom in-house lattice Boltzmann program. By taking samples at different time points during culture, we are able to monitor the mineralization and resulting changes in flow-induced shear distributions in the porous scaffolds as the constructs mature into bone tissue engineered constructs, which has not been investigated previously in the literature. From the work conducted in this study, we proved that the average shear stress per construct consistently increases as a function of culture time, resulting in an increase at Day 16 of 113%. View Full-TextKeywords:
tissue engineering; microcomputed tomography; computational fluid dynamics; shear stress distribution; flow perfusion
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Williams, C.; Kadri, O.E.; Voronov, R.S.; Sikavitsas, V.I. Time-Dependent Shear Stress Distributions during Extended Flow Perfusion Culture of Bone Tissue Engineered Constructs. Fluids 2018, 3, 25.
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