| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 機械工程研究所 === 97 === Tissue engineering is aimed to culture biological substitutes to repair and improve the damaged human tissue and organ. Articular cartilage is a connective tissue, which is difficult to repair after injury because the tissue lacks blood vessels and nerves. Even worse is that chondrocytes are embeded within the extracellular matrix, therefore healthy chondrocytes cannot migrate to the injury site for repair. In order to solve the limited capability of cartilage repair, tissue engineering hopes to develop cartilage substitutes in vitro.
To help engineer cartilage implants, we simulate chondrocyte growth considering cells are seeded on the scaffolds of different thicknesses under static culture for 30 days, in which the medium is replaced every 3 days. We consider the phenomena of diffusion and consumption of nutrients, random walks of cells, nutrient-promoted cell growth, collagen-regulated cell proliferation, and collagen synthesis and degradation. We probe nutrient effects to cell growth, and how the collagen regulates cell growth. Results show the cell distribution is quite uniform at 10 days since the nutrient is still quite uniform in the scaffold at the moment. At 20 and 30 days, cells have higher density on the surface of the scaffold. Cell distribution within the scaffold is mainly influenced by oxygen concentration. Glucose is virtually relatively depleted but has higher concentration on the radial surface of the scaffold so that cell density is higher on the radial than on the horizontal surface. The synthesized collagen increases in amount with cultivation time. Collagen distributes similarly to cells because it is secreted by cells. Results also show that cell growth is more sensitive to oxygen variation for thinner scaffolds; on the contrary, to glucose for thicker scaffolds.
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