Patching up a heart needs the help of tiny blood vessels. Aligning dense vascular structures in engineered cardiac patches can help patients recover from a heart attack.
A team led by Feng Zhao, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan Technological University, recently published two new papers on best practices in engineering prevascularized tissues.
The team’s research paper, published in Theranostics (DOI: 10.7150/thno.29552), focuses on developing a stem cell cardiac patch made with tissue engineered with tiny blood vessels to be like real heart muscle. Their review paper, published in Acta Biomaterialia(DOI: 10.1016/j.actbio.2019.03.016), examines the pros and cons of six innovative strategies for aligning the microvessels in engineered tissues.
Bioengineered Tissue, Organized Vasculature
The vascular system brings nutrients and oxygen to tissues; important ingredients for successful healing following an organ transplant, heart surgery or skin graft. Microvascular structures, which are capillary-like microvessels, are particularly important and, in order to be effective, must be highly aligned, dense and mature. Engineering biomaterials with such a robust vascular system is difficult and depends on the framework — the scaffold — to grow the cells.
“The significance of microvessel organization in 3D scaffolds has largely been ignored,” Zhao explained. “Microvessels are not the same as cells; people have done a lot of work looking at the alignment of cells but this work on microvessels is still new. Understanding the mechanisms behind microvessel alignment in biomaterials will help us and other biomedical engineers to create better, more refined implants and devices.”
To get there, Zhao and her team reviewed the advantages and disadvantages of six different methods used to align vessels: electromechanical stimulation, surface topography, micro-scaffolding and microfluidics, surface patterning and 3D printing.
The Latest on: Engineering prevascularized tissues
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The Latest on: Engineering prevascularized tissues
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