Scaffolds Prepared With Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate-co 3-hydroxyhexanoate) For The Hepatic Differentiation Of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Derived From Human Umbilical Cord Wharton's Jelly

The liver is one of the most important organs in human body providing essential metabolic, exocrine and endocrine functions, while liver disease impact on human health. Today, liver transplantation is the the most effective treatment for some serious stage liver diseases such as cancer, acute liver failure, etc. But the use of this procedure is limited by the availability of donor organs, high costs, and xenograft immune rejection and other reasons. Therefore, a new cell-based therapy of liver disease, such as liver tissue engineering, designed to create an artificial liver to become a substitute for patients with liver tissue. Liver tissue engineering for the treatment of liver disease has brought new hope.In recent years, there is growing concern on stem cell research and its application. Mesenchymal stem cells (mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs) have strong proliferative capacity and multi-differentiation potential, and mesenchymal stem cell is readily available, easy to be isolated and amplified. Therefore, mesenchymal stem cells as seed cells have a good prospect for tissue engineering. In this paper, we isolated the mesenchymal stem cells from human umbilical cord Wharton jelly tissue. Under certain hepatocyte differentiation condition, they were induced to differentiate into hepatocyte-like cells. And it was compared with the bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs). The results showed that UC-MSCs and BM-MSCs have a similar MSC characteristic and can be induced to differentiate into osteogenic, adipogenic, and chondrogenic. After hepatocyte differentiation, they not only express hepatocyte-specific markers including albumin, AFP and CK-18 but also could uptake lipoprotein and store glycogen. The result revealed that UC-MSCs have a similar hepatic differentiation potential to BMSCs. However, umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells are more accessibility, higher proliferation, low immunogenicity compared to bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell, Therefore, UC-MSCs are the more favorable choice than BM-MSCs for the development of new therapeutic concepts for liver diseases and applied in tissue engineering.Polyhydoxyalkanoates (PHA) are polyesters produced by microorganisms under unbalanced growth conditions. The studies show that PHA has good biocompatibility and biodegradability, Research has also shown that had better biocompatibility than other PHA materials, and had more conducive to cell adhesion, proliferation. so we think that PHBVHHx has good prospects in liver tissue engineering.In this study, we chose the umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells as seed cells for liver tissue engineering and PHBVHHx as biomaterial for fabricating the scaffolds to investigate the effect of PHBVHHx on hepatic differentiation of umbilical cord stem cells. The experimental results show that the PHBVHHx scaffold can support umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells induced into hepatocyte cell under hepatocyte induction condition. In conclusion, this study provided some experimental information and data for liver tissue engineering.