Organotypic culture of adult vascularized porcine retina explants in vitro on nanotube scaffolds

Abstract

Background

Organotypic long-term cultivation of vascularized retina explants is a major challenge for application in drug development, drug screening, diagnostics and future personalized medicine. With this background, an assay and protocol for organotypic culture of vascularized retina explants in vitro with optimum tissue integrity preservation is developed and demonstrated. Methods

Morphological, histologic and biochemical integrity as well as viability of vascularized retina explants are compared as function of cultivation time for differently structured nanotube scaffolds. In doing so, porcine retina explants obtained from a local slaughterhouse are employed as paradigm for vascularized retina. Conclusions

We demonstrate that titania nanotube arrays are highly promising as culturing scaffold of vascularized retina explants in vitro due to highly tunable surface properties regarding biomedical signaling. The unprecedented maintenance of tissue integrity allows for screening of pharmacological drugs and disease mechanisms in an ex-vivo test-based culture system with reduced need for animal experiments.