A Predictive Oxygen Durability Model to Analyze Oxygen Consumption of Insulin Producing Cells Encapsulated Within a Highly Oxygenated Hydrogel

Cell transplantation aims to regenerate damaged tissues and cure currently incurable diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes. Post-transplantation cell survival is highly limited by the lack of suitable support matrix (anoikis) and insufficient oxygen supply (hypoxia), which is aggravated when using macroencapsulation devices. Graft failure can be overcome by encapsulation in extracellular matrix (ECM)-based hydrogels with high oxygen capacity. Estimation of the oxygen durability in these systems is critical for the design of hydrogel loaded macroencapsulation devices aimed to increase graft survival. In this study, a novel hyaluronic acid/perfluorocarbon biomaterial (Oxygel) is formulated, oxygenated, and characterized. Oxygel exhibits shear thinning and self-healing properties while it can carry high oxygen payloads and slowly release them for 90 h, exhibiting a 14.5 times smaller oxygen diffusivity than PBS. In parallel, a model able to predict the oxygen durability within Oxygel upon cell encapsulation is developed and experimentally validated in vitro. Correlations between model estimations and experimental results are found, demonstrating the validity of the model to analyze oxygen durability. The application of this mathematical model to oxygenated cell scaffolds (such as Oxygel) holds great promise to improve cell transplantation success.