Oct. 28, 2004 ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Picture a honeycomb and each
compartment in the honeycomb is coated with living cells from a
person's mouth, skin or a piece of bone. University of Michigan
associate professor Nicholas Kotov believes that one day, the
cells in those honeycombs can be used to grow spare parts for
our bodies, or even an entire artificial immune system in a
bottle. An immune system in a bottle would allow faster and
easier production of a flu vaccine, thus preventing another
shortage, he said. In addition, the immune system in a bottle
will give scientists clues how to design vaccines that activate
an immune response to the unchanging part of a flu virus, making
yearly vaccinations, quite possibly, unnecessary, Kotov said. In
the paper "Inverted Colloidal Crystals as 3-D Cell Scaffolds,"
published last month in the journal Langmuir, Kotov's lab in the
chemical engineering department and other collaborators
introduced a way to build those cell-incubating honeycombs---
called scaffolds---so that e