ABSTRACT
Critical-sized craniomaxillofacial (CMF) defects affect the skull, face, and jaw, arising from conditions such as cleft palate, oncologic resections, and high energy impacts, and due to their large size and irregular geometry, cannot heal naturally by the body, thus requiring surgery. The field of biomedical research has long recognized the need to develop higher order biomaterial model systems for improved disease characterization and translational therapeutic/material progress. There is, however, difficulty in developing these workflows at the scale of conventional two-dimensional cell culture screening systems while simultaneously approaching a level of complexity necessary to consider translation to in vivo animal models. Here, we describe a three-dimensional (3D), in vitro model system to investigate the impact of stromal cell migration from one microenvironment to another at a medium-throughput scale. Importantly, we demonstrate the ability of this workflow to be utilized as a screening tool for collagen-based biomaterial motifs of interest in promoting craniomaxillofacial bone defect repair. Taken together we provide a strategy for interpreting cell-to-cell, cell-to-material, and material-to-material interactions across a multidimensional spatiotemporal scale.
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