Regeneration of tissue to replace damaged or injured tissue is the goal of t- sue engineering.
Biomaterials like polyglycolic acid collagen and small-intestinal submuscosa provide a
temporary scaffold to guide new tissue growth and or- nization. Typically they need to be
biodegradable showing good cell atta- ment and proliferation and they should possess
appropriate mechanical properties (Kim et al. 2000). Synthetic polymers ful ll most of these
requirements but lack cell-adhesion peptides on their surface to enhance cell attachment. Ce-
adhesion peptides are present in ECM proteins like collagen and elastin. Thus a synthetic
polymer coated with ECM proteins would result in a scaffold that mimics the natural cellular
environment with enhanced cell attachment and p- liferation. The new bioactive scaffold will be
made by combining a synthetic polymer coated with a layer of recombinant ECM proteins produced
by CHO cells. The rst step consists of identifying polymers that give best results in terms of
CHO cell attachment and growth. Classical techniques to determine biomass are inappropriate to
evaluate 3-D structures. Thus a screening system based on stable GFP expressing CHO cells was
used to compare the different scaffolds. Simple uorescent measurement after cell lysis allows
determining cell attachment and p- liferation on synthetic polymers. Finally CHO cells
producing human recombinant collagen I and elastin were generated. We showed that both proteins
are expressed and secreted by CHO DG44 cells. 2 Materials and Methods 2.
