Progress on many fronts

The TriggerINK team at DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen are working to develop an innovative method to promote cartilage regeneration in damaged joints. To realise their vision, they must first break new ground in various research areas—and last year saw them make several important advances.

In their work to enable regeneration in damaged cartilage, researchers in the TriggerINK project have chosen an innovative, highly sophisticated strategy. Described in simple terms, the team from Aachen are first fabricating a supportive scaffold made of their gelatinous bio-ink that will be injected into the damaged joint. In a second step, a range of techniques and other materials will be applied to stimulate cells into growing cartilage tissue inside the scaffold—and thus trigger healing.

Although many questions must be answered and new techniques developed before their method finds application in medical care, the team made good progress in the second year of their project. One particularly important advance was in cell alignment, as project leader Laura De Laporteexplains. Because the cartilage in our joints is made up of diverse zones in which the cells align themselves differently, one prerequisite to regrowing cartilage is the ability to steer cell growth in several directions. To this end, the TriggerINK team enriches their bio-ink with microscopic gel rods that contain magnetic nanoparticles and align via an external magnetic field. This allows the researchers to arrange the gel rods in a specific direction—and ultimately steer which way the cells grow. In principle, the cells sense the resistance stemming from the rods and then grow parallel to how the rods are aligned. Now, researchers in the group led by co-project leader Matthias Wessling have found a way to mass-produce these gel rods. They chose a method called stop-flow lithography, in which a polymer solution flows through a confined space and, by means of ultraviolet light and a custom-made mask, is then gelled in localised places only. The team then added spindle-shaped magnetic nanoparticles made of the rare mineral maghemite to the gel rods and, already during gel rod production, they succeeded in prealigning the maghemite particles via a magnetic field in various, pre-defined directions. This enables the gel rods to align at predefined angles in one and the same magnetic field.

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