Cell seeding of tissue engineering scaffolds studied by Monte Carlo simulations

Tissue engineering (TE) aims at building multicellular structures in the laboratory in order to regenerate, to repair or replace damaged tissues. In a well-established approach to TE, cells are cultured on a biocompatible porous structure, called scaffold. Cell seeding of scaffolds is an important first step. Here we study conditions that assure a uniform and rapid distribution of cells within the scaffold. The movement of cells has been simulated using the Metropolis Monte Carlo method, based on the principle that cellular system tends to achieve the minimum energy state. For different values of the model parameters, evolution of the cells' centre of mass is followed, which reflects the distribution of cells in the system. For comparison with experimental data, the concentration of the cells in the suspension adjacent to the scaffold is also monitored. Simulations of cell seeding are useful for testing different experimental conditions, which in practice would be very expensive and hard to perform. The computational methods presented here may be extended to model cell proliferation, cell death and scaffold degradation.