Langmuir-Schaefer film deposition onto honeycomb porous films for retinal tissue engineering.

Unlabelled: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss in senior citizens in the developed world. The disease is characterised by the degeneration of a specific cell layer at the back of the eye - the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), which is essential in retinal function. The most promising therapeutic option to restore the lost vision is considered to be RPE cell transplantation.

Biomimetic collagen I and IV double layer Langmuir-Schaefer films as microenvironment for human pluripotent stem cell derived retinal pigment epithelial cells.

The environmental cues received by the cells from synthetic substrates in vitro are very different from those they receive in vivo. In this study, we applied the Langmuir-Schaefer (LS) deposition, a variant of Langmuir-Blodgett technique, to fabricate a biomimetic microenvironment mimicking the structure and organization of native Bruch's membrane for the production of the functional human embryonic stem cell derived retinal pigment epithelial (hESC-RPE) cells. Surface pressure-area isotherms were measured simultaneously with Brewster angle microscopy to investigate the self-assembly of human collagens type I and IV on air-subphase interface.