Research Article Effects of Electrostatic Field on Osteoblast Cells for Bone Regeneration Applications Chen-Ying Su, 1 Tzan Fang, 1 and Hsu-Wei Fang 1,2 1 Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, National Taipei University of Technology, 1, Sec. 3, Zhongxiao E. Rd., Taipei 10608, Taiwan 2 Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Nanomedicine, National Health Research Institutes, No. 35, Keyan Road, Zhunan Town, Miaoli County 35053, Taiwan Correspondence should be addressed to Hsu-Wei Fang; hwfang@ntut.edu.tw Received 13 July 2017; Revised 20 September 2017; Accepted 27 September 2017; Published 13 November 2017 Academic Editor: Liping Wang Copyright © 2017 Chen-Ying Su et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Many external stimulations have been shown to promote bone regeneration. Te efects of an alternating current (AC) electrostatic feld, one of external stimulations, generated from a device with high voltage and low current output on human osteoblastic cell line have been investigated in this study. We investigated how human osteoblasts responded to an AC electrostatic feld, and the output parameters were set as 1 kV and 160 A. Our results showed that, under such condition, the AC electrostatic feld had a downregulation efect on the production ability of alkaline phosphatase and type 1 collagen expression. However, the expression of osteocalcin gene was elevated on the end of EFID treatment suggesting that AC electrostatic feld might be a potential stimulation for accelerating the diferentiation of osteoblastic cells. 1. Introduction Bone is rigid but can still be damaged by external pressure or joint diseases. As the damaged bones are repaired, renewal and reconstruction of bone tissues are in the progress. During bone formation, osteoblasts diferentiate into osteo- cytes that are embedded in mineralized bone matrix [1]. Many external stimulations have been shown to afect bone growth and fracture repair, such as surface remodeling, chemical compounds, or electricity. Both culturing materials and layers of coating can be served as surface remodeling. When treating bone defects with collagen/hydroxyapatite scafolds enriched with polycaprolactone, mesenchymal stem cells, and thrombocyte-rich solution, bone regeneration even occurred in vivo [2]. If the scafolds were coated with calcium phosphate, there was a synergistic efect on bone regeneration in vivo suggesting that surface remodeling can promote bone growth [3]. Growth factors, biomolecules, or inorganic small molecules have also been used as chemical compounds to stimulate bone regeneration [4–6]. However, the efects of chemical compounds were not as obvious as surface remodeling. Electricity is considered as a kind of physical stimulations. It has been shown that capacitively coupled electric feld with direct current (DC) power source has been confrmed to have upregulating efects on calf peritoneum osteoblastic-like primary cells [7], MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts [8], and fetal bovine metacarpophalangeal joint chondrocytes [9] by detecting the expression of ALP, transforming growth factor 1 (TGF- 1), bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), aggrecan, pro- teoglycan, and type II collagen. Te electromagnetic feld had also been proven to be osteoinductive [10] and could upregulate the proliferation of human osteoblastic cells [11]. Recently, the pulsed electromagnetic feld has been shown to stimulate human bone marrow stromal cells to proliferate and diferentiate into osteoblastic cells [12]. However, studies using alternating current (AC) electros- timulations as an external stimulation are rarely reported. Utilizing a very low intensity AC power source has an inhibition efect on the proliferation of some cancer cells, implying that low intensity AC stimulation could be a new Hindawi BioMed Research International Volume 2017, Article ID 7124817, 9 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/7124817