Background and Aims: Tissue engineering is a relatively novel field that has been intensely developing during recent years and has shown to be excessively promising when used for cartilage regeneration. Scaffolds represent important components for tissue engineering. Materials and Methods: The Poly Lactic-Co-Glycolic Acid (PLGA) impregnated with fibrin and hyaluronic acid (HA) produce hybrid s...

NO(2)(+) in six different vibrational states was reacted with C(2)H(2) over the center-of-mass energy range from 0.03 to 3.3 eV. The reaction, forming NO(+)+C(2)H(2)O and NO+C(2)H(2)O(+), shows a bimodal dependence on collision energy (E(col)). At low E(col), the reaction is quite inefficient (<2%) despite this being a barrierless, exoergic reaction, and is strongly inhibited by E(col). For E(c...

BACKGROUND Osteopontin (OPN), an extracellular matrix (ECM) protein, plays an important role in myocardial remodeling by promoting collagen synthesis and accumulation in experimental animal models. AIMS We hypothesized that OPN could be expressed in myocardial tissues and contribute to collagen accumulation and myocardial dysfunction in human dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). METHODS AND RESULT...

Endothelial Progenitor Cell (EPC) based therapies continue to be of interest to treat ischemic events based on their proven role to promote blood vessel formation and thus tissue revascularisation. Current strategies for the production of clinical-grade EPCs requires the in vitro isolation of EPCs from peripheral blood followed by cell expansion to provide sufficient quantities EPCs for cell th...

Glycosaminoglycans (GAG) are multifunctional components of the extracellular matrix (ECM) involved in different steps of the regulation of cellular differentiation. In this study artificial extracellular matrices (aECM) consisting of collagen (Col) I and different GAG derivatives were used as a substrate for human mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSC) to study osteogenic differentiation in vitro. hM...

Various kinds of three-dimensional (3D) scaffolds have been designed to mimic the biological spontaneous bone formation characteristics by providing a suitable microenvironment for osteogenesis. In view of this, a natural bone-liked composite scaffold, which was combined with inorganic (hydroxyapatite, Hap) and organic (type I collagen, Col) phases, has been developed through a self-assembly pr...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Patients with end-stage renal disease or advanced cirrhosis develop bleeding disorders characterized by defective interaction of platelets with damaged subendothelium. The anemia associated with both clinical entities has a negative influence on hemostasis. We evaluated alterations of platelet function in patients suffering from end-stage renal disease (n=21) or hepatic...

The formation of the oriented collagen (Col) fibril arrays on polyimide films (PI-R and PI-HDR), which were rubbed by two kinds clothes with lower higher filament densities, was investigated. Col molecules assembled to be fibrils recognizing physicochemical properties films. In particular, dense nano-grooves PI-HDR effectively induced highly- densely-oriented arrays, occurred interfacial intera...