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Cell engineering

Cells as active crosslinkers in living materials

Nature Reviews Bioengineering volume 2, page 720 (2024)Cite this article

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The quest to mimic the dynamic nature of living tissues has led to substantial advancements in both scaffold-free living materials such as spheroids or cell sheets and in cell sustaining scaffolds. However, existing technologies for assembling cell-rich constructs provide poor control over the volume of newly formed tissues, are restrictive in terms of size and thickness (often requiring subsequent stacking steps to form larger constructs) and have slow assembly times, as they rely on accumulating sufficient extracellular matrix and cell–cell interactions to stabilize the constructs. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Gaspar, Mano and colleagues present a new approach by leveraging the core metabolic processes occurring in human cells, effectively using cells as active crosslinkers to create macroscale living materials, termed Cellgels.

Cellgels can form free-standing structures with programmable heterotypic cell blocks, user-defined geometries and maintain high cell viability during maturation. Notably, the assembled Cellgels can self-reinforce themselves mechanically over time, approaching the stiffness of native soft tissues. “Using this strategy, we can build tissues faster and decouple key properties such as microarchitecture and stiffness from cell density in an entirely orthogonal manner, which is difficult to achieve in other systems,” says Mano. Moreover, unlike other tissue assembly strategies, there is no need to use complex culture media, genetic modifications or expensive equipment, nor is it limited to specific cell types.

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  1. Nature Reviews Bioengineering https://www.nature.com/natrevbioeng/

    Sadra Bakhshandeh

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  1. Sadra Bakhshandeh
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Correspondence to Sadra Bakhshandeh.

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This text on an editorially selected paper was initially drafted using artificial intelligence, then revised and fact-checked by an editor to meet Nature Portfolio publication standards.

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Bakhshandeh, S. Cells as active crosslinkers in living materials. Nat Rev Bioeng 2, 720 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-024-00244-8

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