Meet the teams: Osteo

Combination of hypergravity and nanotechnology for the improvement of the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into osteoblasts

The Osteo Team is made up of two PhD students from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and one Master’s student from the University of Pisa. They are presenting an experiment about the combination of hypergravity stimulation and barium titanate nanoparticles (BTNPs) on the proliferation and the osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Furthermore, they will explore whether hypergravity could improve the nanoparticle internalisation in a cellular system.

The experimental set-up was previously used by the HyperMuscle team during the Spin Your Thesis! 2010 campaign. The experiment consists of a Delrin structure that will be placed in the LDC. This structure hosts the supports for fixing 30 sealed cylindrical vials, where glass coverslips (12 mm in diameter) for cell cultures are located. These tubes are filled with PDMS and growth medium in order to prevent shear stress phenomena. The MSCs with proliferating and differentiating medium will undergo three hours of treatment at 20 g in the LDC system, incubated with and without 20 µg/ml of BTNPs. At the end of each LDC treatment, the cellular cultures of MSCs with BTNPs will be subjected to a set of analyses to assess possible effects of hypergravity stimulus combined with BTNPs on osteogenic differentiation of MSCs. These findings could contribute to improved knowledge of the stimuli involved in osteogenic differentiation, as well as to the design of new approaches for drug delivery and regenerative medicine.

Read the final experiment report here.