Soft lithography and cell guidance a novel approach for regenerative medicine

Accurate control of cell adhesion is becoming a key issue in regenerative medicine in the perspective of generating novel artificial tissues. Local surface topography is known to influence the fate of cell growth, migration and differentiation thus a controlled tailoring of the different features over several length-scales is pursued in the design of scaffolds. Soft lithography offers a tool-box of approaches to combine in an easy way topographic features with both mechanical and chemical surface properties, thus leading to a finer control of the interplay of the mechanics and the chemistry. A straightforward approach for the control of cell fate is based on the realization of neighboring surface features displaying opposite cell anchoring properties, the coexistence of surface regions favoring the cell adhesion with antifouling ones will provide a strong guidance for cell growth and migration. In this frame, Teflon is an interesting material, already employed in medical tools and devices (catheters, stents), is biocompatible, inert but at the same time strongly unprone to cell adhesion. At the same time it is important to go towards the realization of three dimensional scaffolds for tissue regeneration, and in this frame materials such as titanium are playing a key role.