Sharif Digital Repository

Hydrogels are polymeric three-dimensional networks able to swell in the presence of an aqueous medium. Hydrogels from natural proteins and polysaccharides are ideal scaffolds for tissue engineering since they resemble the extracellular matrices of tissue comprised of various amino acids and sugar-based macromolecules.The biocompatible and biodegradable hydrogel scaffolds are promising materials for tissue engineering. Here, we report a new class of hydrogels derived from oxidized alginate (OA) and gelatin. The prepared oxidized alginate was shown to be efficient in crosslinking gelatin, leading to hydrogel formation. The effect of degree of oxidation and concentration of OA on the mechanical... 

In general, repair and regeneration of damaged tissues or lost organ is base definition of a technology named tissue engineering. Tissue engineering technology provides innovative path to achieve better medical treatment, including different methods which manipulate natural or synthetic biomaterials mimicking stem cells environmental condition inside the body, in order to facilitate desired cell expansion and differentiation. Recently, application of cell carriers in form of microcarriers which are injectable, biodegradable and biocompatible have attracted significant attention. Due to increasing effectiveness in animal cell culture.
The aim of this work was fabrication of... 

Renal diseases and consequently kidney failure is one of the important death factors around the world in recent years. It causes hundreds of thousands die every year and is in progress. Researchers believe that increasing chemical and nonchemical materials density in the blood which is the air pollution, use of tobacco and other parameters cause renal cells misfunction in urine filtration and regulation of blood pressure. The goal of this work is design and fabrication of a microfluidic device which provides different cell types to be cultured and imposed pressure. To do this, a high throughput microfluidic device is needed to mimic kidney biologically. Having such a device helps to analyze... 

Fabrication and characterization of different surface charged cellulose electrospun scaffolds including cellulose acetate, cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose and quaternary ammonium cationic cellulose for biomedical applications have been reported in this research. We describe preparation of cellulosic nanofibers through the electrospinning following deacetylation cellulose acetate. Moreover, surface modification of electrospun cellulose nanofibers is carried out to obtain carboxymethyl cellulose and quaternized cellulose nanofibers, respectively. At last, the structural, morphological, mechanical, swelling, wettability and the cell culture properties of the scaffolds were analyzed and... 

Myocardial infarction (MI) is one of the diseases caused by the temporary or permanent cramp of major coronary arteries. Due to this blockage, blood flow to the heart's myocardial tissue is greatly reduced and finally the person suffered from a Heart stroke (HS). Heart tissue engineering is a promising approach, based on the combination of cells and suitable biomaterials to develop and create heart-like biological substitutes. Since high cardiac cell density, providing metabolic needs like oxygen and nutrients was a challenge. So creation of blood vessel networks within this type of designed tissue has been considered very much.The purpose of this project is to construct scaffolds with... 

In the current research, colloidal stability of two different types of coating on the surface of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) was studied. In the first triumph, a dual-layer coating was achieved by utilizing optimum amount of Dextran and different PEG (Poly(ethylene glycol)) concentrations which the weight ratios of iron oxide/PEG were 1/1, 2/1, 4/1, 8/1, and 16/1. Then, the presence of the coating was characterized by XRD, FT-IR, DLS and FE-SEM methods. These results together with the TGA ones revealed that as the concentration of PEG surfactant increases, the thickness of coating increases. Moreover, VSM test was performed to specify the effect of coating on the... 

A bioreactor can refer to any device or system constructed on engineering basis and has an active biological medium. This medium includes aerobic and non-aerobic reactions in which organisms and the theire produced substances have the main role. One of the applications of bioreactors is to provide an appropriate medium for animal and plant cell culture and growth. Nowadays many biological processes in high volume scales are carried out in stirred tank bioreactors. In these bioreactors oxygen transfer is usually increased by increasing turbulence which is necessary for mixing nutrients and keeping the homogeneity of the medium. However, there are some limitations for increasing the stirring... 

Nowadays, we are witnesses of deaths caused by cancer in large statistical amounts. Vast number of investigations are conducted for anticancer drug evaluation on human and animal cells using traditional two-dimensional and three-dimensional culturing platforms. However, most of them are not successful due to the lack of in-vivo relevant microenvironment in these platforms. One of the best cancer in-vitro cultures is the tumor spheroid which is a spherical cellular aggregation. By culturing these tumor spheroids in a microfluidic chip, it is possible to mimic the in-vivo microenvironment elements such as nutrient and metabolite gradients. Here we present a microfluidic device fabricated using... 

Three sizes of silica nanoparticles (160±7, 450±10 and 600±25) were sythetized via template-removing method. The synthetized nanoparticles were functionalized with N-(2-aminoethyl)-3-aminopropyl trimethoxy-silane (EDS) to provide a positive charge on the surface of nanoparticles. BET analysis showed that the average pore diameter, surface area and pore volume of nanoparticles were 2.3 nm, 769 m2.g-1 and 0.44 cm3.g-1, respectively. showed that the Amine-functionalized silica nanoparticles were used to enhance the application of alginate polymer for 3D encapsulation of mammalian cells. Incorporating of silica nanoparticles can be suitable for the bead integrity and attachement of mammalian... 

for decades Cancer has been one of the major causes of death universally. Though extensive efforts in developing new anticancer therapies, they face failures in clinical trials and curing the sick owing to time consuming and expensive preclinical models with poor predictions of drug responses in human. To address this challenge it is crucial to develop preclinical models mimicking the main aspects of a tumor that can provide effective prediction of therapeutic responses. Tumor on chip technology has appeared as a promising approach for providing effective cancer models and reliable preclinical predictions. In this project, collagen was first extracted as the main constituent of the tumor... 

Cancer is one of the most causes of mortality in the world. Leukemia is a type of cancer initiated by the rapid proliferation of blood cells including WBCs, RBCs, and Platelets, that classified into four general types of AML, ALL, CML, and CLL. The main treatment of leukemia is chemotherapy. Because of many problems that patients have with this treatment and not so good results of chemotherapy, we design a microfluidic chip that can perform personalized medicine treatment for leukemia patients.This microchip consists of two main parts, Concentration Gradient Generator (CGG), and cell culture. CGG system is a tree CGG with two inlets and four outlets, which makes a linear concentration of... 

Three-dimensional cell culture and forming multicellular aggregates is superior over traditional monolayer approaches due to better mimicking in vivo conditions and hence functions of a tissue. A considerable amount of attention has been devoted to devising efficient methods for the rapid formation of uniform sized multicellular aggregates. Restoring cartilage to healthy state is difficult due to low cell density and hence low regenerative capacity. Currently used platforms are not compatible with clinical translation and require dedicated handling of trained personnel. However, when engineering and implanting cell microaggregates in a higher concentration, new cartilage is efficiently... 

Significant advances in biotechnology have led to the emergence of a cost-effective way with less ethical issues to study disease, organ functions, tumors, and their response to drugs besides studying on animals. Microfluidic devices and organ on a chip (tumor on a chip) were introduced to remove those obstacles. Organ on a chip is a powerful tool for studying different types of tissues and simulating diseases, especially cancers, for biological and medical applications. Organ (tumor) on a chip is considered as a smaller scale of the real organ or tumor and it causes to the real-time study of tissues and their functions more accurately. In this study, to fabricate a droplet-based... 

Understanding biological systems requires extensive knowledge of individual parameters, and to study the processes of cell differentiation and cell behavior, a suitable environment must be created with the physiological conditions of the human body. For this purpose, with the knowledge of microfluidics, a microenvironment can be provided to study the behavior of cells on a small scale. The use of bone tissue model microfluidic chips is an alternative and new method in which it is possible to study the behavior of cells to differentiate into bone and to examine the toxicity of drugs, which in itself can help in the effective and successful treatment of these cases show. Therefore, in this... 

According to today’s medicine progress, the need for improving the medical facilities have been increased. Within the human body, the biomolecules concentration gradient is regulating the cell functions. Biological processes such as immune response, wound healing, and cancer metastasis have been affected by the bimolecular concentration gradient. So understanding the cell behavior in the presence of a chemical gradient can improve the understanding from these biological processes, and also would help in medical researches. On the other hand, finding the appropriate dose of the drugs and in some cases finding the most effective drug is a clinical challenge that made a new field of research in...