Hybrid sol-gel scaffolds for SAOS-2 cells.

ML FOGLIA; MC DE MARZI; EL MALCHIODI; LE DIAZ,; MF. DESIMONE

Puerto Madryn, Chubut

Congreso; 46th Reunión Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Bioquímica y Biología Molecular; 2010

Sol-gel hybrid materials are being used in the biomaterials field, due to their higher biocompatibility and mechanical properties than organic or inorganic materials alone. When immobilizing cells, the chosen material should be able to maintain its viability as well as provide a suitable platform for support and proliferation. SAOS-2 are osteoblast-like cells which possess several osteoblastic features and whose activity could be easily monitored for viability and morphology assessment. Moreover, silicon materials could be manipulated to render scaffolds of similar compressive strength and modulus to that of bone itself, with possible applications in the bone engineering field. In this work, hybrid sol-gel materials were obtained using as a sol-gel precursor tetra-ethyl-ortho-silicate (TEOS) and as the organic counterparts polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polyethylene glycol (PEG) and gelatin. Each gel contains an organic/inorganic mass ratio of 1,5.