Engineering Cardiac Tissue

Abstract

There are currently 5.7 million Americans living with heart failure and 670,000 new cases diagnosed each year. One reason for heart failure is weakened, dead or scarred tissue on the heart as a result of myocardial infarction. Heart transplant could be a useful therapy, but the effects of rejection, the need to take immunosuppressant drugs and the dire lack of available tissue are all deterrents to transplantation. A solution to some patient’s transplant needs lies in the creation of a tissue graft that could be placed over the injured heart tissue to help repair the patient’s original heart. A graft that avoids rejection by the patient’s immune system would greatly enhance the healing process. Bioartificial tissues created with a patient’s own cells are a solution to creating a graft of heart tissue that would avoid rejection. There are many artificial products commercially available that may serve as a scaffold for tissue growth. The Taylor lab has developed a method to obtain scaffold, called extracellular matrix, from biological tissues by perfusion with a detergent to remove cellular constituents. I have been working with members of the Taylor lab to compare the growth of cardiac cells on this extracellular matrix to growth on an artificial collagen sponge, which may provide insight into the effects of native verses non-native scaffold composition on the growth of cells in vitro. This insight could help to create cardiac patches that may help to alleviate suffering and loss of life due to heart failure.