Plasma-treated, collagen-anchored polylactone: Its cell affinity evaluation under shear or shear-free conditions.

Poly(L-lactic acid)(PLLA) and poly(L-lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) (85/15) were modified by plasma treatment. Then they were collagen anchored (PT/CA), and the cell affinity was evaluated by cell culture under shear or shear-free conditions. A convenient and "intuitionistic" dyeing method has been proposed for measuring the modified depth when plasma treatment is applied for the treatment of porous scaffolds. A parallel plate flow chamber was developed in order to study the cell affinity of a material under shear stress. Our results show that a porous scaffold can be modified by plasma treatment and that a depth of about 4.0 mm for this modification can be reached with NH(3) plasma treatment (50 w, 20 Pa, 5 min). PT/CA modification is an effective surface modification method for facilitating cell transplantation and improving the cell affinity of three-dimensional porous cell scaffolds in tissue engineering. It can solve the problem of non-uniform cell distribution in most synthetic porous cell scaffolds. Using the flow chamber system, a series of quantitative data, including cell adherent fraction, cell area, and mean shape, were compared to evaluate the cell affinity of PLLA before and after PT/CA modification. The results indicate that the quality of cell attachment on PT/CA-modified PLLA apparently is better than that on unmodified PLLA. The flow chamber system potentially may be a tool for evaluating surface modification methods. Copyright 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res 67A: 1139-1147, 2003