Technology

The TissueLastic dish is the first culture device with a soft polymer surface, exhibiting a stiffness that is designed to closely resemble the physical properties of body tissue. The basis of our product is a sterile, transparent soft surface that makes cells feeling 'at home'.

Technical description
In physics terms, conventional tissue culture plastic dishes are some ten thousands KiloPascal (kPa) stiff whereas most tissues in our body are four orders of magnitude softer (1-50 kPa). It emerges as general theme that different cell types prefer a culture substrate stiffness which resembles the stiffness of their origin tissue. Neuronal cells grow best on brain-soft hydrogels which eliminate other, contaminating cells of the tissue preparation. Fibroblasts and liver cells keep their 'tissue-like' character on soft hydrogels but become diseased on plastic. Muscle precursor cells in culture differentiate best into functional muscle fibers on muscle-stiff hydrogels. Cancer cells like soft but dislike stiff hydrogels. Amazingly, the appropriate hydrogel stiffness alone differentiates mesenchymal stem cells into lineages that are needed for regenerative medicine (bone, cartilage, muscle, neurons) by simply mimicking the appropriate tissue stiffness in culture.

Currently, hydrogels are used by skilled laboratories to produce tissue-soft substrates for specific research applications. However, hydrogels have significant drawbacks: 1) Hydrogels must be kept moist, a nightmare for sterility, shipping and stocking. 2) Hydrogels for soft culture are produced with acrylamide, a cancerogenous and neurotoxic agent. 3) It is not possible to graft hydrogels to a plastic surface and chemically activated glass is the only possible support. 4) Cells do not grow on the untreated hydrogel surface requiring tedious, toxic and time-consuming chemical activation. In summary, the present technology is not applicable in larger scale for the average cell culture user.

ExCellness has developed a novel procedure to generate dry polymer substrates with a wide stiffness range (1-10'000 kPa), decreasing to a softness that is presently unmatched for biocompatible and transparent polymers (3-15 kPa). Novel surface activation procedures render this polymer specifically adhesive for different cell types in culture. With these innovations, we can provide a new series of products that retain all advantages of conventional plastic culture vessels but additionally offer a defined mechanical component.