Micro-patterned nanowire surfaces encourage directional neural progenitor cell adhesion and proliferation.

Peripheral nerve damage is common in the United States, with an estimated 200,000 patients treated surgically each year. Autografts, the current gold standard treatment, require that the patient trade functionality by transplanting a nerve from elsewhere in the body. For this reason, tissue-engineering scaffolds that can regenerate nervous tissue and that can direct proliferation need to be investigated. In this work we investigated the influence of micro-patterned nanowire surfaces on neuronal progenitor cell adhesion and proliferation. We created a simple micro-patterning process to create a micro-patterned scaffold with regions lacking a nano-topography approximately 60 microns in width bordered by regions with a nanowire topography approximately 400 microns in width. We hypothesized that neural progenitor cells would preferentially adhere to the regions containing the nano-topography and in turn would avoid regions lacking the nano-topography. Our results indicate that we can direct neural progenitor cell proliferation using this technique. Furthermore, the results show that after 2 days of culture, cells contacting the boundary have elongated morphology. After 5 days of culture, quantifying dimensions on the cell aggregates reveals that they grow twice as long as they do wide on micro-patterned nanowires when compared to controls. These studies suggest that neural progenitor cell growth can be directed by simply creating a scaffold with distinct linear regions of nano-topography bordered by a smooth, hard, hydrophobic surface.