Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
An artificially complex structure requires a new technological
innovation that is obtaining capillaries consisting of endothelial cells
as well as an in vivo
environment into the fabricated tissues. Andrew
et al. attempted to fabricate 3D cardiac tissue by injecting Matrigel-
containing neonatal rat cardiomyocytes into a small chamber that
was put on the artery-vein anastomosis of the groin of nude rats.
After several weeks' in vivo cultivation, the separated tissue from the
animals was found to have many differentiated cardiac muscle cells
with rich vascular networks. In addition, contraction of heart muscle
cells was also observed in all experimental tissue samples after
four-week culture. The result indicates that the generated vessel
network can promote cardiomyocyte proliferation and growth [27].
A research group performed heart reconstruction using capillary
networks having an in vivo extracellular matrix by seeding cardiac
cells into a decellularized rat heart. Ott et al.
perfused a culture
medium into a decellularized heart for eight days after seeding
myocardial cells into it and successfully constructed a beating
heart, indicating that capillary structures can be the key for survival
of functional myocardial cells for a long term [28].These “in vivo
bioreactors” contribute to future fabrication of surgically utilizable
grafts and promise to produce possible artificial organs for replacing
damaged real organs.
6e.6 Summary
Organ engineering techniques require scaffold materials, processing
technology, and bioreactor technology. This section describes that
the progress of bioreactor research is recognized to be closest to
the reality of the construction of 3D myocardial tissue. Although
the bioreactors described in Sections 6e.2, 6e.3, and 6e.4 have great
progress for myocardial culture, for transplantation into a damaged
heart, bioreactors should give anastomotic vessels to fabricated 3D
cardiac tissue, which is described in Section 6e.5. In the future, uses
of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and embryonic stem cells
(ESCs) cells are currently available technologies, which can be applied
to other cells. Thus, the impact of these bioreactor technologies
influencing academic fields and social value will be huge. Other
than for treating patients and investigating the metabolism of drugs,
