Engineering artificial cells to secrete growth factors for repairing damaged tissues

Cell-based therapies stand as a rising therapeutic approach for repairing impaired organ function. However, the use of living cells poses different challenges, including immunological incompatibilities, difficulties of differentiating the cells before transplantation and excessively high costs. These limitations call for integrating complementary technologies to program and manufacture more regulated, standardized, cost-effective cell systems. An emerging course aims to utilize synthetic biology to develop living-like therapeutics, also known as artificial cells. Artificial cell systems are synthetic cell mimics, engineered from the bottom-up to create life-like characterized particles, capable of performing different cellular processes, such as producing RNA and proteins within them.

Here we engineered bottom-up artificial cells programmed to synthesize an optimized form of human Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF), an angiogenesis-inducing protein that promotes the formation of new blood vessels in living tissue. Our preliminary results show that pro-angiogenic artificial cells can stimulate the proliferation and sprouting of endothelial cells and the construction of a mature three-dimensional vascular network in-vitro. Further studies of this system in-vivo will investigate its potential to lead to angiogenesis and thus to tissue regeneration and wound healing. The findings from this study could shed light on artificial cells` potential to become a future, artificial class of cellular therapies.