[Generation of a substitute for human oral mucosa and verification of its viability by tissue-engineering]

Reconstruction of large oral mucosa defects is often challenging, since the shortage of healthy oral mucosa to replace the excised tissues. This way, tissue ingineering techniques may provide a source of autologous tissues available for transplant in these patients. In this work, we have developed a new model for artificial oral mucosa generated by tissue engineering using a fibrin-agarosa scaffold. For that purpose, we have generated primary cultures of human oral mucosa fibroblasts and keratinocytes from small biopsies of normal mucosa oral using enzymatic treatments. Then, we have determined the viability of cultured cells by electron probe quantitative X-ray microanalysis, and we have demonstrated that most of the cells in the primary cultures were alive and hd high K/Na ratios. Once cell viability was determined, we used cultured fibroblasts and keratinocytes to develop an artificial oral mucosa construct by using a fibrin-agarosa extracellular matrix and a sequential culture technique using porous culture inserts. Histological analysis of the artificial tissues showed high similarities with normal oral mucosa controls. The epithelium of the oral substitutes had several layers, with desmosomes and apical microvilli and microplicae. Both the controls and de oral mucosa substitutes showed high suprabasal expression of cytokeratin 13 and low expression of cytokeratin 10. All these results suggest that our model of oral mucosa using fibrin-agarose scaffolds show several similarities with native human oral mucosa.