Jennifer Patterson

• Ph.D.
• Researcher at Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies

Shear rheology and atomic force microscopy (AFM) are used to characterize the stiffness of hydrogels in tissue engineering applications, with several studies reporting differences of several orders of magnitude in the elastic moduli determined by these two methods. In this work, we compared the elastic properties of soft fibrin and PEG hydrogels us...

With the increased research on supramolecular hydrogels, many spectroscopic, diffraction, microscopic, and rheological techniques have been employed to better understand and characterize the material properties of these hydrogels. Specifically, spectroscopic methods are used to characterize the structure of supramolecular hydrogels on the atomic an...

Tissue and organ failure has induced immense economic and healthcare concerns across the world. Tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary biomedical approach which aims to address the issues intrinsic to organ donation by providing an alternative strategy to tissue and organ transplantation. This review is specifically focused on cartilage tissue....

The development of commercial collagen inks for extrusion-based bioprinting has increased the amount of research on pure collagen bioprinting, i.e., collagen inks not mixed with gelatin, alginate, or other more common biomaterial inks. New printing techniques have also improved the resolution achievable with pure collagen bioprinting. However, the...

Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting is an additive manufacturing process in which the combination of biomaterials and living cells, referred to a bioink, are deposited layer-by-layer to form biologically active 3D tissue constructs. Recent advancements in the field show that the success of this technology highly depends on the development of novel b...

Tailored hydrogels mimicking the native extracellular environment could help overcome the high variability in outcomes within regenerative endodontics. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of the chemokine-binding and antimicrobial polymer, chlorite-oxidized oxyamylose (COAM), on the microstructural properties of fibrin and self-assembling pepti...

Hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) are responsible for blood cell production throughout life. Biophysical cues affect several stem cell behaviours. Various studies have investigated the effects of bone marrow (BM) niche elasticity on HSPCs behaviour, however, the effects of other niche sites like the fetal liver (FL) were not studied befor...

The expansion of knowledge about the microbiome, which is a broad term that entails the collective genetic content of microbiota as a community of microorganisms living on or in a host, has challenged our notion about how microbes can influence human health and disease. This article presents the Human Microbiome Project as the first big research en...

Tailored hydrogels mimicking the native extracellular environment could aid in overcoming the high variability in regenerative endodontics outcomes. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of the chemokine-binding and antimicrobial polymer, chlorite-oxidized oxyamylose (COAM), on the microstructural properties of fibrin and self-assembling peptide...

Hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) are responsible for the generation of blood cells throughout life. It is believed that, in addition to soluble cytokines and niche cells, biophysical cues like elasticity and oxygen tension are responsible for the orchestration of stem cell fate. Although several studies have examined the e↵ects of bone m...

Peptides are short sequences of amino acids. Peptides with biological functionality can be derived from the active domain of proteins or determined from peptide screening experiments. Combined with modern chemical techniques to facilitate peptide synthesis, this leads to peptide modification as an interesting approach to render synthetic biomateria...

Naturally, cells reside in 3D microenvironments composed of biopolymers that guide cellular behavior via topographical features as well as through mechanical and biochemical cues. However, most studies describing the influence of topography on cells’ behavior are performed on rigid and synthetic 2D substrates. To design systems that more closely re...

Nanoparticles (NPs) formed from hyperbranched polymers are highly attractive organized structures in nanomedicine. Herein, we utilize copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition of hyperbranched poly(arylene oxindole) derivatives to prepare amphiphilic conjugates with different degrees of PEGylation that form spherical NPs in water with tunable par...

Synthetic hydrogels address a need for affordable, industrially scalable scaffolds for tissue engineering. Herein, a novel low molecular weight gelator is reported that forms self-healing supramolecular hydrogels. Its robust synthesis can be performed in a solvent-free manner using ball milling. Strikingly, encapsulated cells spread and proliferate...

Hydrogels are attractive materials for stimulating 3D cell growth and tissue regeneration, and they provide mechanical support and physical cues to guide cell behavior. Herein, we developed a robust methodology to increase the stiffness of polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogels by successfully incorporating carbon nanotubes (CNTs) within the polymer m...

For cartilage tissue engineering, several in vitro culture methodologies have displayed potential for the chondrogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Micromasses, cell aggregates or pellets, and cell sheets are all structures with high cell density that provides for abundant cell-cell interactions, which have been demonstrated to...

Collagen is a key component of the extracellular matrix in a variety of tissues and hence is widely used in tissue engineering research, yet collagen has had limited uptake in the field of 3D printing. In this study we successfully adapted an existing electronic printing method, aerosol jet printing (AJP), to print high resolution 3D constructs of...

Introduction: Collagen is the main structural protein in mammals and hence has a wide variety of potential applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM). However, relative to other more commonly printed biomaterials, it remains under- exploited in 3D printing due to the slow conformational transition from a printable fluid to...

The rapidly growing field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine has brought about an increase in demand for biomaterials that mimic closely the form and function of biological tissues. Therefore, understanding the cellular response to the changes in material composition moves research one step closer to a successful tissue-engineered prod...

Hyperbranched polymers (HBPs) are dendritic macromolecules with a three-dimensional globular nanostructure. Due to their unique properties, HBPs are interesting for biomedical applications such as drug/protein delivery and tissue engineering, and functionalized HBPs can be tailored to exhibit specific biological responses. Superelectrophilic arylat...

The recent development and clinical success of molded recombinant collagen corneal substitutes offers a tantalizing prospect for the application of additive biomanufacturing in corneal tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM). The cornea has a number of advantages over other tissues for additive biomanufacturing in that it is relatively...

Cartilage damage affects a large population via acute and chronic injury and disease. Since native cartilage does not self-renew, cartilage tissue engineering has gained traction as a potential treatment. However, a limiting factor is that the primary cell type in cartilage, the articular chondrocyte, tends to de-differentiate when grown on 2D surf...

The combination of progenitor cells with appropriate scaffolds and in vitro culture regimes is a promising area of research in bone and cartilage tissue engineering. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), when encapsulated within hydrogels composed of the necessary cues and/or preconditioned using suitable culture conditions, have been shown to differentia...

The recent development and clinical success of molded recombinant collagen corneal substitutes offers a tantalizing prospect for the application of additive biomanufacturing in corneal tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM). The cornea has a number of advantages over other tissues for additive biomanufacturing in that it is relatively...

Advanced biomaterials that are capable of guiding robust bone regeneration are highly demanded for translational therapy of bone defects or bone augmentation in clinics. One of the strategic approaches is to produce tissue engineering (TE) constructs that mediate bone regeneration by recapitulating the natural bone formation or healing process. In...

Background: Polymer-based systems are attractive in drug delivery and regenerative medicine due to the possibility of tailoring their properties and functions to a specific application. Methods: The present review provides several examples of molecularly engineered polymer systems, including stimuli responsive polymers and supramolecular polymer...

Statement of significance: Fibrin is a natural biopolymer that has drawn much interest as a biomimetic carrier in tissue engineering applications. We hereby use a novel combined approach for the structural characterization of fibrin networks based on optical microscopy and light scattering methods that can also be applied to other fibrillar hydrog...

Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting is a rapidly advancing tissue engineering technology that holds great promise for the regeneration of several tissues, including bone. However, to generate a successful 3D bone tissue engineering construct, additional complexities should be taken into account such as nutrient and oxygen delivery, which is often in...

The emerging field of tissue engineering reveals promising approaches for the repair and regeneration of skeletal tissues including the articular cartilage, bone, and the entire joint. Amongst the myriad of biomaterials available to support this strategy, hydrogels are highly tissue mimicking substitutes and thus of great potential for the regenera...

This chapter discusses the application of various imaging technologies for in situ characterization of hydrogel implants. It begins with the motivation for imaging implants in situ and then introduces the most relevant imaging modalities. The second half of the chapter addresses the challenges of imaging hydrogels in situ and discusses the use of c...

Bioactive hydrogels formed by Michael-type addition reactions of end-functionalized poly(ethylene glycol) macromers with cysteine-containing peptides have been described as extracellular matrix mimetics and tissue engineering scaffolds. Although these materials have shown favorable behavior in vivo in tissue repair, we sought to develop materials f...

Bioactive hydrogels formed from the Michael-type addition reactions of end-functionalized poly (ethylene glycol) macromers with thiol-containing protease-sensitive peptide crosslinkers have previously been described as matrices for cell-induced enzymatic remodeling. In this study, we sought to develop materials formulations with different degradati...

Non-healing fractures can result from trauma, disease, or age-related bone loss. While many treatments focus on restoring bone volume, few try to recapitulate bone organization. However, the native architecture of bone is optimized to provide its necessary mechanical properties. Hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogel scaffold systems with tunable degradatio...

Biomaterial matrices are being developed that mimic the key characteristics of the extracellular matrix, including presenting adhesion sites and displaying growth factors in the context of a viscoelastic hydrogel. This review focuses on two classes of materials: those that are derived from naturally occurring molecules and those that recapitulate k...

The polymeric implant material poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) degrades by a process of bulk degradation, which allows it to be used for the controlled release of therapeutic molecules from implants and microspheres. The temporal characterization of PLGA microsphere degradation has been limited by the need to destructively monitor the samples at...

The deposition of amyloid is associated with several neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and the prion diseases. To probe the relationship between amino acid sequence and the propensity to form amyloid, we studied a combinatorial library of sequences designed de novo. All sequences in the library were designed to share an ident...

Hydrogel scaffolds releasing angiogenic and osteoinductive molecules were used to induce bone growth in a bone defect model. Optical coherence tomography was utilized to characterize morphological changes during the temporal progression of bone regeneration.

Amyloid deposits are associated with several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and the prion diseases. The amyloid fibrils isolated from these different diseases share similar structural features. However, the protein sequences that assemble into these fibrils differ substantially from one disease to another. To probe the re...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. Non-healing fractures can result from trauma, disease, or age-related bone loss. While many treatments focus on restoring bone volume, few try to recapitulate bone organization. However, the native architecture of bone is optimized to provide its mechanical properties. Hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogel s...