Biomaterials for Cell Manufacturing

Cell therapies, potent populations of cells used to treat disease and injury, can be strategically manufactured with biomaterial intervention to improve clinical translation. In this viewpoint, we discuss biomaterial design and integration into cell manufacturing steps to achieve three main goals: scale-up, phenotype control, and selection of potent cells. Material properties can be engineered to influence the cell-biomaterial interface and, therefore, impart desirable cell behavior such as growth, secretory activity, and differentiation. Future directions for the field should capitalize on the combinatorial design of biomaterial properties to yield highly specific and potent cell populations. Furthermore, future biomaterials could contribute to novel high-throughput cell separation technologies that can individually select the most therapeutically relevant cells within a produced batch.