A schematic representation of the process involved in screening antifibrotic hydrogels. Credit: Mukherjee, S. et al. Nat. Biomed. Eng. (2023)
A new cellular barcoding technique can help screen a chemically-modified library of antifibrotic hydrogel formulations1. The method may help identify formulations that increase long-term performance of hydrogel-based medical devices and biomaterial-encapsulated therapeutic cells.
Implanted devices trigger a cascade of immune responses, including the release of various immune cells. Eventually, these cells stick to the surface of the devices and cause fibrotic overgrowth. Existing techniques for screening antifibrotic hydrogels are time-consuming and expensive.
To find a better method, the scientists transplanted hydrogel-encapsulated specific human cells into rodent or nonhuman primate models. They evaluated the hydrogels at a single implantation site using cellular barcoding techniques in which individual cells are labelled with unique nucleic acid sequences.
The technique efficiently probes millions of cells in parallel in a mixed populations of cells. The team, which included researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) in Varanasi, used it to screen a large library of chemically modified alginate analogues in a mouse model, with four times the efficiency of conventional methods.
The researchers identified three antifibrotic hydrogels by screening 20 alginate formulations in one mouse and 100 alginate formulations in one primate. One formulation helped control blood glucose levels in diabetic mice and two others prevented fibrotic growth on medical-grade catheters.
