Control of cellular adhesiveness in hyaluronic acid-based hydrogel through varying degrees of phenol moiety crosslinking.

Current hyaluronic acid-based hydrogels often cause cytotoxicity to encapsulated cells and lack the adhesive property required for effective biomedical and tissue engineering applications. Provision of the cell-adhesive surface is an important requirement to improve its biocompatibility. An aqueous solution of hyaluronic acid possessing phenolic hydroxyl (HA-Ph) moieties is gellable via a horseradish peroxidase (HRP)-catalyzed oxidative crosslinking reaction. This study evaluates the effect of different degrees of crosslinked Ph moieties on cellular adhesiveness and proliferation on the resultant enzymatically crosslinked HA-Ph hydrogels. Mechanical characterization demonstrated that the compression force of engineered hydrogels could be tuned in the range of 0.05-35 N by changing conjugated Ph moieties in the precursor formulation. The water contact angle and water content show hydrophobicity of hydrogels increased with increasing content of crosslinked Ph groups. The seeded mouse embryo fibroblast-like cell line and human cervical cancer cell line, on the HA-Ph hydrogel, proved cell attachment and spreading with a high content of crosslinked Ph groups. The HA-Ph with a higher degree of Ph moieties shows the maximum degree of cell adhesion, spreading, and proliferation which presents this hydrogel as a suitable biomaterial for biomedical and tissue engineering applications. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.