In Vitro Construction Of Hypopharynx Muscle

In the field of tissue engineering, polymeric materials with high biocompatibility likepolylactic acid and polyglycolic acid have been widely used for fabricating living constructs. Forhypopharynx tissue-engineering, skeletal muscle is one important functional part of the wholeorgan, which assembles the unidirectionally aligned myotubes. The pharyngeal constrictor musclealso plays an important role in swallowing and pronunciation. In this study, a polyurethane (PU)scaffold with micro-channel patterns was used to provide aligning guidance for the seeded humanmuscle satellite cells. Due to the low hydrophilicity of PU, the scaffold was grafted with silkfibroin (PU-SF) or gelatin (PU-Gel) to improve its cell adhesion properties. Scaffolds wereobserved to degrade slowly over time, and their mechanical properties and hydrophilicities wereimproved through the surface grafting. Also, the satellite cells seeded on PU-SF had the higherproliferative rate and better differentiation compared with those on the control or PU-Gel. Ourresults demonstrate that polyurethane scaffolds seeded with human muscle satellite cells holdpromise to guide hypopharynx muscle regeneration.