The strategy of tissue engineering includes seeding cells onto porous scaffolds. The cellular construct is cultured in vitro for a period of time before transplantation for the patient. Because of the intrinsic complexity of biological systems, it is valuable to have models of simulation that can assess the culture conditions and optimize experiments. This work presents a mathematical model to account for the effects of glucose and type II collagen on chondrocyte growth under static culture conditions. Dependence of cell growth on collagen was assumed as a biphasic function of collagen quantity, whereby the cell growth rate increases and then decreases with increasing collagen content. Results from simulation were compared with experimental data in literature. The model was then applied to investigate the effects of cell seeding area, demonstrating the spatiotemporal evolution of cell distribution in scaffolds. Results show that the conventional uniform seeding method may not be a good way of gaining uniform and large cell number densities at the final stage of cultivation. A seeding mode that has cells reside initially in the middle area of scaffold was shown to be able to not only reduce the diffusion limitation of nutrients but also weaken the inhibiting impact of aggregated collagen on cell growth. Therefore the middle seeding mode may result in better cell amounts and uniformities for developing tissue engineered constructs.
