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TISSUE-SPECIFIC STEM CELLS

Tethered Epidermal Growth Factor Provides a Survival Advantage to Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Departments of ^aBiological Engineering,
^dChemical Engineering, and
^eMechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;
^bHarvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA;
^cDepartment of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Key Words. Mesenchymal stem cells • Epidermal growth factor • Extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase • Fas ligand • Cell death Cell spreading • Bone graft

Correspondence: Linda G. Griffith, Ph.D., MIT 16-429, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. Telephone: 617-253-0013; Fax: 617-253-2400; e-mail: griff{at}mit.edu

Received on May 26, 2006; accepted for publication on January 9, 2007.

First published online in STEM CELLS EXPRESS  January 18, 2007.


MSC can act as a pluripotent source of reparative cells during injury and therefore have great potential in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. However, the response of MSC to many growth factors and cytokines is unknown. Many envisioned applications of MSC, such as treating large defects in bone, involve in vivo implantation of MSC attached to a scaffold, a process that creates an acute inflammatory environment that may be hostile to MSC survival. Here, we investigated cellular responses of MSC on a biomaterial surface covalently modified with epidermal growth factor (EGF). We found that surface-tethered EGF promotes both cell spreading and survival more strongly than saturating concentrations of soluble EGF. By sustaining mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase-extracellular-regulated kinase signaling, tethered EGF increases the contact of MSC with an otherwise moderately adhesive synthetic polymer and confers resistance to cell death induced by the proinflammatory cytokine, Fas ligand. We concluded that tethered EGF may offer a protective advantage to MSC in vivo during acute inflammatory reactions to tissue engineering scaffolds. The tethered EGF-modified polymers described here could be used together with structural materials to construct MSC scaffolds for the treatment of hard-tissue lesions, such as large bony defects.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest is found at the end of this article.

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