Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6e
Bioreactor Technologies for Myocardial
Tissue Engineering
Katsuhisa Sakaguchi
Research Institute for Science and Engineering, Waseda University,
2-2 Wakamatsu-cho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 162-8480, Japan
katsuhisa@aoni.waseda.jp
6e.1 Introduction
The key technical challenges for materializing reliable myocardial
tissues used for transplantation therapy is to establish technologies
for preparing a vascular network [1-5]. Cultured cells on a normal
culture dish are dependent on the diffusion of nutrients and oxygen
from the culture medium, being in contact with their outer cell
membranes for survival. However, nutrient and oxygen diffusion
is insufficient for culturing a thick tissue more than 100 μm in
thickness [6, 7]. In the case of
in vivo cell survival in transplanted
tissue, a vascular network, which is a total of 100,000 km long in the
case of the whole human body, spreads in the tissue and supplies
oxygen and nutrients to the cells, keeping a distance of tens of
micrometers between cells and vessels. To survive an engineered
