Growing bone tissue-engineered niches with graded osteogenicity: an in vitro method for biomimetic construct assembly

The traditional bone tissue engineering approach exploits mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to be seeded once only on 3D scaffolds, hence differentiated for a certain period of time and resulting in a homogeneous osteoblast population at the endpoint. However, after achieving terminal osteo-differentiation, cell viability is usually markedly compromised. On the other hand, naturally occurring osteogenesis results from the coexistence of MSC progenies at distinct differentiative stages in the same microenvironment. This diversification also enables long-term viability of the mature tissue. We report an easy and tunable in vitro method to engineer simple osteogenic cell niches in a biomimetic fashion. The niches were grown via periodic re-seeding of undifferentiated MSCs on MSC/scaffold constructs, the latter undergoing osteogenic commitment. Time-fractioning of the seeded cell number during differentiation time of the constructs allowed graded osteogenic cell populations to be grown together on the same scaffolds (i.e., not only terminally differentiated osteoblasts). In such cell-dynamic systems, the overall differentiative stage of the constructs could also be tuned by varying the cell density seeded at each shot. In this way, we generated two different biomimetic niche models able to host good reservoirs of pre-osteoblasts and other osteo-progenitors after 21 culture days. At that time, the niche type resulting in 40.8% of immature osteogenic progenies and only 59.2% of mature osteoblasts showed calcium content comparable to the constructs obtained with the traditional culture method (i.e., 100.03 ± 29.30 vs. 78.51 ± 28.50 pg/cell, respectively; p = n.s.), the latter colonized only by fully differentiated osteoblasts showing exhausted viability. This assembly method for tissue-engineered constructs enabled a set of important parameters, such as viability, colonization and osteogenic yield of the MSCs to be balanced on 3D scaffolds, thus achieving biomimetic in vitro models with graded osteogenicity, which are more complex and reliable than those currently used by tissue engineers