Tissue engineering has the potential to augment bone grafting. Employing microcarriers as cell-expansion vehicles is a promising bottom-up bone tissue engineering strategy. Here we propose a collaborative approach between experimental work and mathematical modelling to develop protocols for growing microcarrier-based engineered constructs of clinically relevant size. Experiments in 96-well plates characterise cell growth with the model human cell line MG-63 using four phosphate glass microcarrier materials. Three of the materials are doped with 5 mol% TiO2 and contain 0%, 2% or 5% CoO, and the fourth material is doped only with 7% TiO2 (0% CoO). A mathematical model of cell growth is parameterised by finding material-specific growth coefficients through data-fitting against these experiments. The parameterised mathematical model offers more insight into the material performance by comparing culture outcome against clinically relevant criteria: maximising final cell number starting with the lowest cell number in the shortest time frame. Based on this analysis, material 7% TiO2 is identified as the most promising.

中文翻译：

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用于阐明成骨细胞在磷酸盐玻璃微载体培养物中生长的参数化数学模型。

组织工程学具有增强骨移植的潜力。将微载体用作细胞扩增载体是一种有前途的自下而上的骨组织工程策略。在这里，我们提出了一种在实验工作和数学建模之间的协作方法，以开发用于生长具有临床相关大小的基于微载体的工程构造的协议。在96孔板中进行的实验使用四种磷酸盐玻璃微载体材料表征了模型人细胞系MG-63的细胞生长。其中三种材料掺杂了5 mol％的TiO2，并包含0％，2％或5％的CoO，而第四种材料仅掺杂了7％的TiO2（0％CoO）。通过针对这些实验的数据拟合找到材料特定的生长系数，可以对细胞生长的数学模型进行参数化。通过将培养结果与临床相关标准进行比较，参数化的数学模型可提供对材料性能的更深入了解：从最短时间内的最低细胞数开始，最大化最终细胞数。根据此分析，确定7％的TiO2是最有前途的材料。