In the United States alone, approximately 6.2 million people suffer from bone injuries annually.1 While there are several clinical repair options at the surgeon’s disposal in severe injuries and fractures, many of the current treatment strategies result in additional complications for the patient. As a widely expanding field in polymer science, a regenerative medicine approach can be used to overcome these limitations. Phenylalanine-based poly(ester urea)s (PEU) are high modulus, resorbable polymers with many potential uses in the surgical repair of bone defects. In vitro and in vivo studies have shown that phenylalanine-based PEUs have non-toxic hydrolysis byproducts, tunable degradation times, and significant synthetic flexibility.2,3 Phenylalanine PEUs have been chemically modified with osteogenic growth peptide (OGP) to tyrosine-based monomer subunits. OGP is a naturally occurring growth factor which aids in proliferation, differentiation, and matrix mineralization of osteoblasts.4,5 These OGP-tethered PEUs have been fabricated into porous scaffolds and cultured in vitro to examine their effect on differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) toward the osteogenic lineage. The influence of tethered OGP on the hMSC proliferation and differentiation profile was measured using immunohistochemistry, biochemistry, and quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qrt-PCR). In vitro data suggests that the OGP-tethered scaffolds show enhanced signaling for osteogenic differentiation compared to control scaffolds lacking tethered OGP. To further increase the modulus and osteoinductive ability of phenylalanine-based PEUs for bone repair, the synthesis of the second generation materials using OGP crosslinkers is now being conducted. References [1] Patel, Z.S.; et. al. Bone. 2008, 43, 931-940. [2] Stakleff, K.S.; et. al. Acta Biomaterialia. 2013, 9, 5132-5142. [3] Yu, J.; et. al. Macromolecules. 2014, 47, 121-129. [4] Greenberg, Z. C.; et al. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1995, 80, 2330-2335. [5] Moore, N.M.; et. al. Biomaterials. 2010, 31, 1604-1611.

OGP-functionalized phenylalanine-based poly(ester ureas) for enhancing osteoinductive potential of human mesenchymal stem cells

250th National Meeting (2015)

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