Cellular medicine holds enormous potential to treat many challenging diseases and biomaterials play an important role in many aspects of cellular medicine including cell manufacturing, engineering and delivery. In this talk, I will discuss two examples in developing novel biomaterials to address some of the challenges in cellular medicine. First, I will describe compartmentalized hydrogel microcapsules for scalable organoid culture. Organoid technology has received tremendous attention recently and have broad applications in disease modeling and cell therapy. However, the manufacturing of organoids at a large scale has been challenging. Using small intestinal organoids as a model, I will show how advanced microcapsule designs may facilitate the scale-up of organoid culture. Second, I will describe a simple and translatable cell delivery device termed as TRAFFIC (thread-reinforced alginate fiber for islets encapsulation) for potential type 1 diabetes (T1D) treatment. Cell encapsulation and delivery has been shown to hold promise for effective, long-term treatment of T1D. However, challenges remain for its clinical applications. For example, there is an unmet need for an encapsulation system that is capable of delivering sufficient cell mass while still allowing convenient retrieval or replacement. Here, I will discuss how the TRAFFIC design can potentially meet this need. We demonstrated the therapeutic potential of TRAFFIC through the correction of chemically induced diabetes in C57BL/6 mice using rat islets for 3 months as well as in immunodeficient SCID-Beige mice using human islets for 4 months. We further showed, as a proof of concept, the scalability and retrievability in dogs. After 1 month of implantation in dogs, the device could be rapidly retrieved through a minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure. This encapsulation device may contribute to a cellular therapy for T1D because of its retrievability and scale-up potential.

Developing advanced biomaterials for cellular medicine

256th National Meeting (2018)

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