Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Strategies for Tissue Engineering Vascularized Cardiac Patches to Treat Myocardial Infarctions

2018; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-99319-5_6

1618-7210

Justin Morrissette‐McAlmon, Robert N. Hawthorne, S. H. Snyder, Warren L. Grayson,

3D Printing in Biomedical Research

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the western world. One of the most common forms of heart disease is myocardial infarction. As a result of infarction, the native myocardium is permanently damaged, and functionality is reduced. Due to the limited regenerative potential of the native myocardium, there exists a need to restore and repair the damaged zone. Cardiac tissue engineering offers a unique approach to regenerate the damaged myocardium. The high metabolic demands of the myocardium require dense vasculature to support the contractile properties of cardiomyocytes. Developing engineered cardiac tissues with dense, functional vasculature has therefore become an important goal of the field. Approaches to recapitulate the native myocardium typically involve combining multiple cell types, including cardiomyocytes (electrically excitable cells), endothelial cells (vessel development), and fibroblasts/mural cells (vasculature stabilization). These approaches have also utilized a number of different scaffold materials, culture conditions, and applied stimuli both to promote the functional development of the tissue and to increase the amount of vasculature present in the constructs. In this chapter, we will discuss the development of vascularized cardiac tissue and how all of these developments have drawn on and contributed to our understanding of how complex, multicellular interactions affect tissue development and vascular formation.