Design and development of bioreactor for smooth muscle cells cultivation

• Main Author: Tang, Li Juan.
• Other Authors: Susanna Leong Su Jan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Chemical engineering::Biotechnology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16667
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary field that was used to develop biological or hybrid substitutes for implantation into the body for remodeling and regeneration of disease tissue. The focus of this report is to design and fabricate a perfusion bioreactor, which is subsequently used for the culturing of smooth muscle cells. In order to ensure the success of seeding the smooth muscle cells onto the scaffold, research was conducted to ensure that the biomimetic environment provided in the subsequent experiment is suitable for cell culturing and cell proliferation. As such, it was determined that all the experiments involving cell cultures are performed in a 5% CO2 incubator, at 37oC. The emphasis of this report was to determine the factors required to optimize the cell seeding efficiency using the perfusion bioreactor that was designed. The factors that were studied include the flow configuration, the flow rates and the thickness of scaffold used. From the experiments conducted, it was concluded that the optimum cell seeding efficiency was achieved using a radial flow configuration, at a flow rate of 1 ml/s to seed the cell culture on a scaffold with 5 mm thickness.