Production of living myocardial slices from circulatory death hearts after exvivo heart perfusion.

Abstract

Living myocardial slices (LMS) are ultrathin sections of beating cardiac tissue that maintain 3-dimensional microarchitecture and multicellularity and are cultured under conditions of near-physiological preload and continuous electrical excitation.1 LMS are mostly produced from human surgical biopsies obtained from heart transplantations or mechanical support implantations, limiting the type and availability of provided tissue. Here, we present a recently validated novel technique for LMS1 that we implemented for donation after circulatory death (DCD) porcine slaughterhouse hearts on ex vivo heart perfusion (EVHP).