Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting

Mechanobiology of Disease

Poster Abstracts

50-POS

Board 50

Investigating the Roles of Hyaluronan in Wound Closure Using Nanostructured PEGDA

Hydrogels

Burcu Minsky

1,2

, Christiane Antoni

1,2

, Patricia Hegger

1,2

, Joachim P. Spatz

1,2

, Heike Boehm

1,2

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany,

University of Heidelberg,

Heidelberg, Germany.

Wound healing is a complex and highly coordinated process that involves dynamic interactions

between epidermal and dermal layers. Even though most of the surface wounds could regenerate

leading to a minimal scar formation, this orchestrated network of events could be disrupted

especially with advanced age or chronic illnesses, such as diabetes. The impairment of this

intricate balance can lead to a spectrum of healing process. The processes controlling wound

healing are strongly dependent on the spatial and temporal presentation of ECM components,

which modulates biochemical signaling events, and structural organization of the matrix, which

controls the permeability and stiffness. Hyaluronan, one of the major components of the

provisional matrix during wound healing, promotes the healing process. However, the complete

understanding of this regulation is largely lacking. The objective of this work is to develop a

well-controlled biomaterial platform that enables (1) mechanically suitable environments to

guide keratinocyte and fibroblast migration and proliferation, (2) isolating effects of biochemical

components, i.e., adhesive ligands and hyaluronan. Therefore, we developed hybrid

poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) hydrogels including cell adhesive, RGD containing

peptide. The advantage of using PEGDA is that the stiffness can easily be tuned by varying the

PEG chain length and weight percent to match the stiffness of the wound bed during the healing

process. Additionally, these hydrogels are patterned using block copolymer micellar

nanolithography (BCML)

to immobilize hyaluronan on quasi-hexagonally arranged gold

nanoparticles at a controlled distance. The immobilization is achieved by introducing a thiol

linker at the reducing end of hyaluronan, which has been proven success to graft hyaluronan on

gold surfaces with a high coverage.Furthermore, mechanical properties and biophysical

characterizations (mesh sizes and diffusion properties) of the hydrogels are evaluated using well-

established techniques.