Migration and Osteogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells on Titanium with a Micro-Patterned Gelatin Matrix

Dental implants significantly improve dental occlusion after tooth loss.However, titanium dental implants do not immediately integrate with the host bone.Furthermore, patients who have insufficient bone at the implant site tend to require pre-treatment surgery, such as autologous bone transplantation, which poses significant burden to the patient.Treatment can also be affected by early invasion of epithelial cells into the gingival epithelium, and this can also hinder the success of implant osseointegration.Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop a dental implant that can reduce the burden on the patient and increase the rate and success of osseointegration.We hypothesized that an efficient strategy for rapid and reliable osseointegration could be achieved by controlling the balance of the cellular populations around the dental implant.Thus, in this study, we micro-patterned a titanium surface with a gelatin matrix and investigated how this surface affected the adherence of mesenchymal stem cells to each of the surfaces.We found that the mesenchymal stem cells first adhered to the titanium and then to the gelatin, enabling cell adhesion to be controlled in a time-dependent manner.The alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity of the cells on the titanium surface was stronger than that of cells on the gelatin matrix, suggestive of earlier differentiation of the cells into boneforming cells.These results suggest that it may be possible to develop functional dental implants that can control the respective populations of epithelial and mesenchymal stem cells at the site of implantation, and thereby promote rapid and reliable osseointegration.