Assembly of Tissue-Engineered Blood Vessels with Spatially Controlled Heterogeneities.

ABSTRACT: Tissue-engineered human blood vessels may enable in vitro disease modeling and drug screening to accelerate advances in vascular medicine. Existing methods for tissue-engineered blood vessel (TEBV) fabrication create homogenous tubes not conducive to modeling the focal pathologies characteristic of certain vascular diseases. We developed a system for generating self-assembled human smooth muscle cell (SMC) ring units, which were fused together into TEBVs. The goal of this study was to assess the feasibility of modular assembly and fusion of ring building units to fabricate spatially controlled, heterogeneous tissue tubes. We first aimed to enhance fusion and reduce total culture time, and determined that reducing ring preculture duration improved tube fusion. Next, we incorporated electros

SUBMITTER: Strobel HA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6198764 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature