Work

Generation of Aligned Functional Myocardial Tissue Through Microcontact Printing

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: Advanced heart failure represents a major unmet clinical challenge, arising from the loss of viable and/or fully functional cardiac muscle cells. Despite optimum drug therapy, heart failure represents a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the developed world. A major challenge in drug development is the identification of cellular assays that accurately recapitulate normal and diseased human myocardial physiology in vitro. Likewise, the major challenges in regenerative cardiac biology revolve around the identification and isolation of patient-specific cardiac progenitors in clinically relevant quantities. These cells have to then be assembled into functional tissue that resembles the native heart tissue architecture. Microcontact printing allows for the creation of precise micropatterned protein shapes that resemble structural organization of the heart, thus providing geometric cues to control cell adhesion spatially. Herein we describe our approach for the isolation of highly purified myocardial cells from pluripotent stem cells differentiating in vitro, the generation of cell growth surfaces micropatterned with extracellular matrix proteins, and the assembly of the stem cell-derived cardiac muscle cells into anisotropic myocardial tissue.

Source: Journal of Visualized Experiments

DOI: 10.3791/50288

Authors: Ayhan Atmanli, Ibrahim J. Domian

Institutions: Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Stem Cell Institute

Language: English

Topic: Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine

Subfield: Surgery

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, Harvard University, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute