Engineered heart tissue for regeneration of diseased hearts

Cardiac tissue engineering aims at providing contractile heart muscle constructs for replacement therapy in vivo. At present, most cardiac tissue engineering attempts utilize heart cells from embryonic chicken and neonatal rats and scaffold materials. Over the past years our group has developed a no...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biomaterials 2004-04, Vol.25 (9), p.1639-1647
Main Authors: Zimmermann, Wolfram-Hubertus, Melnychenko, Ivan, Eschenhagen, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Animals, Newborn
Cardiac tissue engineering
Cardiomyocyte
Cell Culture Techniques - instrumentation
Cell Culture Techniques - methods
Cell Division
Chick Embryo
Collagen
Disease Models, Animal
Extracellular matrix
Heart Diseases - physiopathology
Heart Diseases - surgery
Myocytes, Cardiac - pathology
Myocytes, Cardiac - transplantation
Rats
Rats, Inbred F344
Regeneration - physiology
Stem cell
Stem Cell Transplantation - methods
Tissue Engineering - instrumentation
Tissue Engineering - methods
Transplantation
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Summary:Cardiac tissue engineering aims at providing contractile heart muscle constructs for replacement therapy in vivo. At present, most cardiac tissue engineering attempts utilize heart cells from embryonic chicken and neonatal rats and scaffold materials. Over the past years our group has developed a novel technique to engineer collagen/matrigel-based cardiac muscle constructs, which we termed engineered heart tissue (EHT). EHT display functional and morphological properties of differentiated heart muscle and can be constructed in different shape and size from collagen type I, extracellular matrix proteins (Matrigel ®), and heart cells from neonatal rats and embryonic chicken. First implantation studies in syngeneic Fischer 344 rats provided evidence of EHT survival and integration in vivo. This review will focus on our experience in tissue engineering of cardiac muscle. Mainly, EHT construction, matrix requirements, potential applications of different cell types including stem cells, and our first implantation experiences will be discussed. Despite many critical and unresolved questions, we believe that cardiac tissue engineering in general has an interesting perspective for the replacement of malfunctioning myocardium and reconstruction of congenital malformations.
ISSN:0142-9612
1878-5905
DOI:10.1016/S0142-9612(03)00521-0