Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Singapore

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 . 1 Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany, 2 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.

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