Harnessing engineered slippery surfaces for tissue repair

Transplanting a preformed dense and coherent sheet of regenerative stem cells directly onto damaged heart, cartilage or bone tissue of ailing patients often is a more promising route to recovery than transplanting the cells just loosely mixed together. The challenge in obtaining intact cell sheets, however, lies in releasing them from the substrate they are grown on in the culture dish quickly and without affecting their efficiency. Current methods to detach intact transplantable cell sheets fro