Cell encapsulation in gelatin microspheres for tissue engineering

Abstract

Since the cell encapsulation technology has been used for many areas, such as cell

delivery, cell culture and tissue engineering. This promising technique still undergoes

development and improvement. Recently there is a new method for cell encapsulation by

forming of temperature-cured dissolvable cell-laden gelatin microspheres. We expected

that method could be used for fabricating BTC-6 constructs using this gelatin

microspheres as intermediate. Before encapsulated BTC-6 cells, we did HepG2 cells

encapsulation and got good results of cell viability and could form injectable cell islet,

this result offered a premise for encapsulating BTC-6 cells. However after the experiment

done on beta cells, the result was not so good, but this method still somehow can provide

a suitable condition for beta cells proliferation. So future research should be focus

optimizing the parameters in fabrication, such as the size of microspheres and

concentration of cells. Cell viability was evaluated though WST-1, Live and dead.