Thick acellular heart extracellular matrix with inherent vasculature: a potential platform for myocardial tissue regeneration.

ABSTRACT: The decellularization of porcine heart tissue offers many opportunities for the production of physiologically relevant myocardial mimetic scaffolds. Earlier, we reported the successful isolation of a thin porcine cardiac extracellular matrix (pcECM) exhibiting relevant bio-mechanical properties for myocardial tissue engineering. Nevertheless, since native cardiac tissue is much thicker, such thin scaffolds may offer limited regeneration capacity. However, generation of thicker myocardial mimetic tissue constructs is hindered by diffusion limitations (~100 μm), and the lack of a proper vascular-like network within these constructs. In our present work, we focused on optimizing the decellularization procedure for thicker tissue slabs (10-15 mm), while retaining their inherent vasculature, an

SUBMITTER: Sarig U 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3463286 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature