(262g) Graduate Student Award Session: Mimicking Biopolymer Structure in Synthetic Hydrogels for Model Extracellular Matrices
AIChE Annual Meeting
2022
2022 Annual Meeting
Materials Engineering and Sciences Division
Biomaterials: Graduate Student Award Session
Tuesday, November 15, 2022 - 9:48am to 10:06am
Varying the peptoid crosslinker structure enabled control over bulk hydrogel mechanics, with the more rigid crosslinkers leading to an increase in hydrogel elasticity. Additionally, we found that crosslinker structure dictated the scaling behavior of mechanical properties with crosslinker length: increasing helical crosslinker length further increased elasticity, while increasing length of unstructured crosslinkers led to a decrease in elasticity. Leveraging the ability to decouple elasticity from network connectivity, we next evaluated each hydrogel as a substrate for human mesenchymal stromal cell (hMSC) culture and found that all crosslinker formulations resulted in high cell viability. Furthermore, the cells spread more on stiffer substrates, with the most molecularly rigid substrates leading to cell areas and morphologies similar to those cultured on tissue culture plastic. Lastly, we determined how each hydrogel affected Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) production, which is a measure of the immunosuppressive capacity of the hMSCs. Excitingly, we found that softer hydrogels upregulated IDO production. These results demonstrate the potential utility of this hydrogel platform in hMSC culture, where mechanics and network connectivity can be decoupled using crosslinker structure. Further studies investigating the impact of molecular rigidity on cell-matrix interactions will facilitate the design of more biomimetic artificial ECMs.