Plasma‐treated, collagen‐anchored polylactone: Its cell affinity evaluation under shear or shear‐free conditions

Abstract Poly(L‐lactic acid)(PLLA) and poly(L‐lactic‐co‐glycolic acid) (PLGA) (85/15) were modified by plasma treatment. Then they were collagen anchored (PT/CA), and the cell affinity was evaluated by cell culture under shear or shear‐free conditions. A convenient and “intuitionistic” dyeing method has been proposed for measuring the modified depth when plasma treatment is applied for the treatment of porous scaffolds. A parallel plate flow chamber was developed in order to study the cell affinity of a material under shear stress. Our results show that a porous scaffold can be modified by plasma treatment and that a depth of about 4.0 mm for this modification can be reached with NH₃ plasma treatment (50 w, 20 Pa, 5 min). PT/CA modification is an effective surface modification method for facilitating cell transplantation and improving the cell affinity of three‐dimensional porous cell scaffolds in tissue engineering. It can solve the problem of non‐uniform cell distribution in most synthetic porous cell scaffolds. Using the flow chamber system, a series of quantitative data, including cell adherent fraction, cell area, and mean shape, were compared to evaluate the cell affinity of PLLA before and after PT/CA modification. The results indicate that the quality of cell attachment on PT/CA‐modified PLLA apparently is better than that on unmodified PLLA. The flow chamber system potentially may be a tool for evaluating surface modification methods. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res 67A: 1139–1147, 2003