Cleanrooms
Regenerative medicine
The greatest value for electrospun materials is in the rapidly emerging field of regenerative medicine , where they can be implanted to promote the repair or regeneration of damaged organs by the patient ’ s own cells . As populations age and the costs of healthcare increase , there is increasing demand for effective medical device implants . There is a high rate of failure of current medical implants ( shoulders , knees etc .) and the cost of long , or repeat , hospital stays is high .
Electrospun scaffolds can be designed to mimic the body ’ s extracellular matrix , to carry bioactive factors and to degrade , or resorb , over a period once healing has taken place . There is an increasing body of academic publications describing applications of electrospun biomaterials in the regeneration of a range of applications such as corneal transplants , nerve and tendon repair , wound healing and stress urinary incontinence , but reproducible , scalable , clinical grade manufacture is needed in order to reap the benefits of this innovation in healthcare .
Demand for effective medical device implants is increasing through participation in collaborative projects .
For example , the Electrospinning Company is developing scaffold inserts for use in single use bioreactors for the expansion of stem cells for therapeutic use in an EU FP7-funded project ( HESUB ) together with partners from Denmark , Sweden and Germany .
The global stem cell market is growing at around 40 per cent per year as new therapies are developed , yet is constrained by the capacity of the current equipment .
Billions of cells are required for therapeutic treatments and production costs must come down to make these treatments available to the general public . Inclusion of scaffolds to provide a high surface area for proliferation of adherent cells in 3D offers the potential to increase bioreactor productivity . The company has developed materials suitable for a range of stem cells which withstand the fluid dynamic stresses of a bioreactor environment and production of high quality muscle satellite cells has been demonstrated .
64 SUMMER 2016