Biological Response of Tissue Engineered Mucosa to Ionizing Radiation: A Time Study

Introduction Tissue Engineered Mucosa (TEM) was originally designed to reconstruct large oral defects remaining in the oral cavity after oncological resection. TEM consists of human keratinocytes and fibroblasts seeded onto an a-cellular dermal scaffold . Previous study 2 in our laboratory showed that TEM could also be used as a tool to study the biological response to ionizing radiation (IR), as IR is a major part of the treatment of patients after oncological resection. This study focused on the biological response of TEM in time after exposure to a single dose of IR. We hypothesize that TEM is capable to detect DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) caused by IR, and that TEM can repair this damage using the main DNA repair pathways, non-homologous endjoining (NHEJ) and homologous recombination (HR).