Heart Muscle Tissue Engineering

Abstract

In this chapter, we present current state of the art in heart muscle tissue engineering. The field of heart muscle tissue engineering, or simply cardiac tissue engineering as it is commonly referred to, is focused on the fabrication of 3D artificial heart muscle. We start this chapter with a brief description of the potential clinical applications of 3D heart muscle as a patch to augment, repair and/or replace left ventricular function in infarcted hearts. We then describe the steps involved in the fabrication of 3D heart muscle. With this background in place, we present six different case studies that showcase different technological platforms to support the fabrication of 3D heart muscle. The six case studies have been carefully selected to highlight many facets of cardiac tissue engineering and are based on completely different technologies to bioengineer 3D heart muscle. The first case study describes a novel method to fabricate 3D heart muscle by the self-organization of primary cells in the absence of any synthetic scaffolding. The second case study is based on polymeric scaffolds to support formation of 3D heart muscle tissue. The third case study illustrates the use of acellular grafts to bioengineer 3D heart muscle. The fourth case study is based on magnetic levitation technology to fabricate 3D heart muscle in the absence of any synthetic scaffolding. The fifth case study illustrates the use of biodegradable hydrogels to bioengineer 3D heart muscle. The fifth and final case study describes a very novel model to fabricate vascularized 3D heart muscle using an in vivo culture environment. These six case studies have been carefully prepared to summarize the current state of the art in the field of heart muscle tissue engineering. After a detailed description of the case studies, we end by illustrating how different technological elements from each of the six case studies can be coupled to develop complete novel strategies to bioengineer functional 3D heart muscle.