Question

A new vascular stent has been developed that is made of a flexible polymer. Preliminary characterization indicates that this material has the properties necessary to open an artery without causing vessel damage. However, the researchers are unsure if this material is toxic to the vascular tissue.

How would you set up the in vitro cell culture experiment to determine the biocompatibility of the material? How would you have the cells interact with the material? What are your controls? What type of cells would you use? What outcome measures are you looking to get? What technique would you use to measure your outcome? Justify all your answers.

Answer 1

In order to check the bio compatibility of the material an experiment can be set up where the cells may be isolated for a tissue culture to check the cytotoxicity of the material.Agar diffusion test may be carried out which will give the desired results.

A layer of agar is placed on the cell culture and the newly developed material is placed over and incubated.If the material is cytotoxic it will result it's destructive activity on the cell by diffusing through the agar layer after incubation.

The cells- material interaction will be through the agarose layer in between.The diffusion of the materials into the layer will essentially result in similar conditions of a direct contact between cell and material.

For the controls a positive control may be a compound which can give color to the agar layer such as neutral red or phenol , so the lysis of the cells under observation will result in decolorized zone. A negative control may be any material that does not elicit any effect on the layer like oils.

The cells that should be employed for this experiment should be the cells present in the inner arterial walls like endothelial , fibroblast or amooth muscle cells.

Outcomes may be the development of a zone where the lysis of cells may occur.This can be estimated by measuring the dimensions of this zone.