| Summary: | One of today’s most widely spread health problems is urinary incontinence, affecting 60-80% of the US population from age 15 and up. Treatment based on the possibility to implant a scaffold seeded with the patients’ own urine-derived stem cells, hUSC, to regenerate the damaged muscle tissue, would prove effective. A main challenge in regenerating new tissue from cell-seeded scaffolds is the limited cell survival due to insufficient oxygen diffusion to the center of the scaffold. Ways of enhancing cell survival, and thereby, proliferation and differentiation, is by hypoxic preconditioning of the cells or implantation in an oxygen-release material. Hypoxic preconditioning has shown to enhance proliferation as well as the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor, VEGF, in for example human bone marrow derived stem cells, hBMSC. VEGF is involved in the establishment of vasculature structures and an upregulation of its expression may therefore help promote quicker angeogenisis, increasing the oxygen supply and the cell survival. Oxygen-release materials have shown to enhance cell survival and growth both in vitro and in vivo. This study aims to investigate the effect of hypoxia on hUSC, during 9 days of hypoxic culturing (2.0% ± 0.1% O2) with and without oxygen-release material (PLGA 75:25 with 5 w% CPO) in vitro. hBMSC, and human smooth muscle cells, hSMC, have been used as control groups. Cell proliferation, morphology, differentiation, production of VEGF, and expression of hypoxia inducible factor HIF-1α have been studied. According to the results, combining hypoxic preconditioning of hUSC with implantation in oxygen-release material could be an effective way to regenerate muscular tissue. Hypoxic preconditioning enhanced cell proliferation, production of VEGF, and HIF-1α expression. The increase of VEGF and HIF-1α would promote vascularization when implanted. The oxygen-release material showed possible promotion of cell differentiation, which would augment the hUSCs’ myogenic differentiation, while supplying oxygen until the tissue’s vascular structure has been established.
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