Accordion-Like Honeycombs for Tissue Engineering of Cardiac Anisotropy

By G. C. Engelmayr, M. Cheng, C. Bettinger, J. Borenstein, Robert Langer, L. Freed. Nature Materials, 2008

839 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tissue engineered grafts may be useful in myocardial repair, however previous scaffolds have been structurally incompatible with recapitulating cardiac anisotropy. Utilizing microfabrication techniques, a novel accordion-like honeycomb microstructure was rendered in poly(glycerol sebacate) to yield porous, elastomeric 3-D scaffolds with controllable stiffness and anisotropy. Accordion-like honeycomb scaffolds with cultured neonatal rat heart cells demonstrated utility via: (1) closely matched mechanical properties compared to native adult rat right ventricular myocardium, with stiffnesses controlled by polymer curing time; (2) heart cell contractility inducible by electric field stimulation with directionally-dependent electrical excitation thresholds (p<0.05); and (3) greater heart cell alignment (p<0.0001) than isotropic control scaffolds. Prototype bilaminar scaffolds with 3-D interconnected pore networks yielded electrically excitable grafts with multi-layered neonatal rat heart cells. Accordion-like honeycombs can thus overcome principal structural-mechanical limitations of previous scaffolds, promoting the formation of grafts with aligned heart cells and mechanical properties more closely resembling native myocardium.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Surgery

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93e810ad6f4de6fed77bf5ff9f0e6576c068001c

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Citations in the corpus

Bioprinting 3D microfibrous scaffolds for engineering endothelialized myocardium and heart-on-a-chip (2016, positive): “In this context, Freed and co-workers demonstrated that anisotropic scaffolds bearing an accordion-like honeycomb structure could induce the generation of highly oriented cardiac fibers [26].”
Microfabrication of complex porous tissue engineering scaffolds using 3D projection stereolithography (2012, background): “Precisely defined accordion-like microstructures having biomimetic mechanical properties were shown to mimic the function of adult rat right ventricular myocardium [18] and microengineered 3D porous structure of a multi-layered elastomeric scaffolds allowed heart cells to be readily seeded by perfus”
Complexity in biomaterials for tissue engineering. (2009, methodology): “In one recent study, scaffold geometry was used to align cardiac muscle cells, to elicit directional contractions that are essential for efficient blood transfe”
Nanowired three dimensional cardiac patches (2011, background): “The structural and mechanical properties of scaffolds have been improved by microfabrication processes that control stiffness and anisotrop”
Engineering microscale topographies to control the cell–substrate interface (2012, neutral): “mechanical properties of native myocardium [219].”