The National Taiwan University Undergraduate Student Dissertation Award is a university-wide competition for undergraduate students. The competition aims to encourage undergraduate students to actively engage in research work and cultivate their logical reasoning, independent thinking, and problem-solving abilities. This is a university-level competition and the award is the highest honor of all undergraduate dissertation competitions. 林奕維, a fourth-year student of our department, won the first prize in this year competition with his "Application of Gas Phase Polymer Scaffold Induced Cell Arrangement in Tissue Engineering", and represented the Department of Chemical Engineering in the school-wide competition. He stood out from all the participants and won the highest "傅斯年 Award" (he is one of the five winners).
The core of the whole paper is the use of chemical vapor deposition (CVD Polymerization) polymerization technology and under the principles of chemical engineering thermodynamics and mass transfer kinetics to achieve the effective control of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) in the CVD process. CMC molecules, providing the elongated structure, create a tissue-engineered bioscaffold with aligned pores. Through the bioscaffold, a suitable growth environment for dental pulp cells is developed, and effective growth along the scaffold is observed; in the scaffold, dental pulp cells can even successfully differentiate into peripheral hard dentin cells. Since the medical technology today cannot effectively treat tooth decay, this technology has high potential of treating tooth decay. A growth environment is established in vitro to cultivate healthy dental pulp cells, which are then filled in to repair the defected tooth. We will continue to study this technology, hoping that it can not only be applied to dental pulp cells, but also cells such as muscle cells and nerve cells that need repairing.
上圖為本次化工系林奕維同學參加學士班學生論文獎時所使用的海報