THE EFFECT OF SUBSTRATE'S PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS ON CELL ORGANIZATION

In recent years, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering have emerged as areas of large interest within the biomedical community, with the aim of reconstructing and regenerating tissue damaged by trauma or diseases. Understanding the factors that can modulate cell behavior and their ability to organize into tissue is therefore of fundamental importance. Numerous studies have shown that cell behavior is strongly influenced by substrate’s properties, which can be finely tuned in order to design substrate that induce specific cellular responses. This thesis investigates the influence of the physical characteristics of substrates, such as stiffness and roughness, on the topological characteristics of cell networks.