A multiprong approach to cancer gene therapy by coencapsulated cells

Biomaterials for Personalized Cell Therapy

Cell therapy has already had an important impact on healthcare and provided new treatments for previously intractable diseases. Notable examples include mesenchymal stem cells for tissue regeneration, islet transplantation for diabetes treatment, and T cell delivery for cancer immunotherapy. Biomaterials have the potential to extend the therapeutic impact of cell therapies by serving as carriers that provide 3D organization and support cell viability and function. With the growing emphasis on personalized medicine, cell therapies hold great potential for their ability to sense and respond to the biology of an individual patient. These therapies can be further personalized through the use of patient-specific cells or with precision biomaterials to guide cellular activity in response to the needs of each patient. Here, the role of biomaterials for applications in tissue regeneration, therapeutic protein delivery, and cancer immunotherapy is reviewed, with a focus on progress in engineering material properties and functionalities for personalized cell therapies.

Design of an Adhesive Film-Based Microfluidic Device for Alginate Hydrogel-Based Cell Encapsulation

To support the increasing translational use of transplanted cells, there is a need for high-throughput cell encapsulation technologies. Microfluidics is a particularly promising candidate technology to address this need, but conventional polydimethylsiloxane devices have encountered challenges that have limited their utility, including clogging, leaking, material swelling, high cost, and limited scalability. Here, we use a rapid prototyping approach incorporating patterned adhesive thin films to develop a reusable microfluidic device that can produce alginate hydrogel microbeads with high-throughput potential for microencapsulation applications. We show that beads formed in our device have high sphericity and monodispersity. We use the system to demonstrate effective cell encapsulation of mesenchymal stem cells and show that they can be maintained in culture for at least 28 days with no measurable reduction in viability. Our approach is highly scalable and will support diverse translational applications of microencapsulated cells.

Therapeutic applications of encapsulated cells

The synergy of some promising advances in the fields of cell therapy and biomaterials together with improvements in the fabrication of more refined and tailored microcapsules for drug delivery have triggered the progress of cell encapsulation technology. Cell microencapsulation involves immobilizing the transplanted cells within a biocompatible scaffold surrounded by a membrane in attempt to isolate the cells from the host immune attack and enhance or prolong their function in vivo. This technology represents one strategy which aims to overcome the present difficulties related to local and systemic controlled release of drugs and growth factors as well as to organ graft rejection and thus the requirements for use of immunomodulatory protocols or immunosuppressive drugs. This chapter gives an overview of the current situation of cell encapsulation technology as a controlled drug delivery system, and the essential requirements of the technology, some of the therapeutic applications, the challenges, and the future directions under investigation are highlighted.

Microencapsulated mammalian cells for simultaneous production of VEGF165b and IFNα

Targeted and simultaneous delivery VEGF165b and IFN alpha in anti-angiogenic and other applications could offer several advantages. For this a system was design using artificial cell alginate-poly-L-lysine- alginate (APA) microcapsules. Result confirms the ability of this system for simultaneous production of these proteins for 28-days. The IFN alpha on a 3 days period increased from 8 ± 0.36 μg/ml at day 10 to 27 ± 2.4 μg/ml at day 16 and then dropped to 6.5 ± 0.5 μg/ml. The VEGF165b on a 3 days period increased from 2.7 ± 0.7 μg/ml at day 10 to 6.9 ± 1 μg/ml at day 16.