Technology Summary

Although it is well known in the tissue engineering field that an implantable scaffold’s degradation rate should match the tissue regeneration rate, lack of a quantitative method for in vivo validation has limited progress in this area. To address this issue, researchers at Penn State have created a family of citrate-based biodegradable polymers that comprise a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agent either integrated into or pendent from their polymeric backbones. These materials can also incorporate photoluminescent moieties, providing dual-imaging capabilities to track tissue regeneration and scaffold degradation processes non-invasively. MRI-active, NIR-excitable implanted biodegradable polymers permit 3D imaging of structure and volume changes, even in deep tissue. The figure above shows T1-weighted images of scaffolds implanted within deep tissue at different time points.