Flow and transport in tissue engineering scaffolds: A network modelling approach

Abstract

Tissue engineers aim to grow functional tissues in the laboratory. One approach is to seed cells on a porous biomaterial scaffold, which is then cultured in a flow perfusion bioreactor. Such bioreactors enhance the transport of nutrients and growth factors to the cells by convection, and provide mechanical loads to mechanosensitive tissues. In this paper, we adopt a network modelling approach to provide insight into the nature of the flow, nutrient transport and cell distribution through the porous scaffold. The approach resolves flow and nutrient transport at the pore scale, and thus enables the local cellular environment to be determined. We demonstrate how this method can be used to study the impact of scaffold geometry (e.g. porosity, connectivity) on the cellular environment, and hence provide insight into the optimum culture conditions required to obtain functional tissues.