cardiovascular tissue engineering

Many vascular disorders arise as a result of dysfunctional smooth muscle cells. Tissue engineering strategies have evolved as key approaches to generate functional vascular smooth muscle cells for use in cell-based precision and personalized regenerative medicine approaches. This article highlights some of the challenges that exist in the field and presents some of the prospects for translating research advancements into therapeutic modalities. The article emphasizes the need for better developing synergetic intracellular and extracellular cues in the processes to generate functional vascular smooth muscle cells from different stem cell sources for use in tissue engineering strategies...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

INTRODUCTION: Cardiac contractility modulation (CCM) is a medical device-based therapy delivering non-excitatory electrical stimulations to the heart to enhance cardiac function in heart failure (HF) patients. The lack of human in vitro tools to assess CCM hinders our understanding of CCM mechanisms of action. Here, we introduce a novel chronic (i.e., 2-day) in vitro CCM assay to evaluate the effects of CCM in a human 3D microphysiological system consisting of engineered cardiac tissues (ECTs)...

Targeting metalloproteinases (MPs) has been the center of attention for developing therapeutics due to their contribution to a wide range of diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative disease, and preterm labor. Protein-based MP inhibitors offer higher stability and selectivity, which is critical for developing efficient therapeutics with low off-target effects. Tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs), natural inhibitors of MPs, and antibodies provide excellent protein scaffolds for engineering selective or multispecific MP inhibitors...

An essential aspect of cardiovascular in situ tissue engineering (TE) is to ensure balance between scaffold degradation and neo-tissue formation. We evaluated the degradation velocity and neo-tissue formation of three electrospun supramolecular bisurea-based biodegradable scaffolds that differ in their soft-block backbone compositions only. Scaffolds were implanted as interposition grafts in the abdominal aorta in rats, and evaluated at different time points (t = 1, 6, 12, 24 and 40 weeks) on function, tissue formation, strength and scaffold degradation...

In recent years, research has highlighted the association between increased adipose tissue surrounding the human heart and elevated susceptibility to cardiovascular diseases such as atrial fibrillation and coronary heart disease. However, the manual segmentation of these fat deposits has not been widely implemented in clinical practice due to the substantial workload it entails for medical professionals and the associated costs. Consequently, the demand for more precise and time-efficient quantitative analysis has driven the emergence of novel computational methods for fat segmentation...

OBJECTIVE: Metabolic changes have been extensively documented in neurodegenerative brain disorders, including Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Mutations in the C. elegans swip-10 gene result in dopamine (DA) dependent motor dysfunction accompanied by DA neuron degeneration. Recently, the putative human ortholog of swip-10 (MBLAC1) was implicated as a risk factor in AD, a disorder that, like PD, has been associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. Interestingly, the AD risk associated with MBLAC1 arises in subjects with cardiovascular morbidity, suggesting a broader functional insult arising from reduced MBLAC1 protein expression and one possibly linked to metabolic alterations...

INTRODUCTION: Aortic stenosis (AS) is the leading heart valve disease in developed countries, often caused by calcific degeneration. In low-and-middle-income countries, it's primarily due to RHD. Prevalence of AS increases with age and up to 22.8% of those affected over the age of 75. While surgical aortic valve replacement is standard treatment for AS, many older individuals are not ideal candidates. Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) offers an alternative. The REPRISE III trial showed the Lotus valve outperformed the CoreValve/EvolutR TAVR valves in various metrics over 2 years...

BACKGROUND: Myocardial infarction (MI), often a frequent symptom of coronary artery disease (CAD), is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Acute myocardial infarction (AMI), a major form of cardiovascular disease, necessitates a deep understanding of its complex pathophysiology to develop innovative therapeutic strategies. Exosomal RNAs (exoRNA), particularly microRNAs (miRNAs) within cardiac tissues, play a critical role in intercellular communication and pathophysiological processes of AMI...

Omentin is an adipokine mainly produced by visceral fat tissue. It has two isoforms, omentin-1 and omentin-2. Omentin-1 is predominantly secreted by visceral adipose tissue, derived specifically from the stromal vascular fraction cells of white adipose tissue (WAT). Levels of omentin-1 are also expressed in other WAT depots, such as epicardial adipose tissue. Omentin-1 exerts several beneficial effects in glucose homeostasis in obesity and diabetes. In addition, research has suggested that omentin-1 may have atheroprotective (protective against the development of atherosclerosis) and anti-inflammatory effects, potentially contributing to cardiovascular health...

Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) is characterized by the fibrosis and mineralization of the aortic valve, which leads to aortic stenosis and heart failure. At the cellular level, this is due to the osteoblastic-like differentiation of valve interstitial cells (VICs), resulting in the calcification of the tissue. Unfortunately, human VICs are not readily available to study CAVD pathogenesis and the implicated mechanisms in vitro; however, adipose-derived stromal/stem cells (ASCs), carrying the patient's specific genomic features, have emerged as a promising cell source to model cardiovascular diseases due to their multipotent nature, availability, and patient-specific characteristics...

Because of the physiological and cardiac changes associated with cardiovascular disease, tissue engineering can potentially restore the biological functions of cardiac tissue through the fabrication of scaffolds. In the present study, hybrid nanofiber scaffolds of poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and bioglass type 58S (58SiO2 -33CaO-9P2 O5 , Bg) were fabricated, and their effect on the spontaneous activity of chick embryonic cardiomyocytes in vitro was determined. PVA/Bg nanofibers were produced by electrospinning and stabilized by chemical crosslinking with glutaraldehyde...

Tissue engineering aims to overcome the current limitations of heart valves by providing a viable alternative using living tissue. Nevertheless, the valves constructed from either decellularized xenogeneic or purely biologic scaffolds are unable to withstand the hemodynamic loads, particularly in the left ventricle. To address this, we have been developing a hybrid tissue-engineered heart valve (H-TEHV) concept consisting of a nondegradable elastomeric scaffold enclosed in a valve-like living tissue constructed from autologous cells...

The golden rule in tissue engineering is the creation of a synthetic device that simulates the native tissue, thus leading to the proper restoration of its anatomical and functional integrity, avoiding the limitations related to approaches based on autografts and allografts. The emergence of synthetic biocompatible materials has led to the production of innovative scaffolds that, if combined with cells and/or bioactive molecules, can improve tissue regeneration. In the last decade, silk fibroin (SF) has gained attention as a promising biomaterial in regenerative medicine due to its enhanced bio/cytocompatibility, chemical stability, and mechanical properties...

Objective : Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) can measure T1 and T2 relaxation times for myocardial tissue characterization. However, the CMR procedure for T1/T2 parametric mapping is time-consuming, making it challenging to scan heart patients routinely in clinical practice. This study aims to accelerate CMR parametric mapping with deep learning.

 Approach : A deep-learning model, SwinUNet, was developed to accelerate T1/T2 mapping. SwinUNet used a convolutional UNet and a Swin transformer to form a hierarchical 3D computation structure, allowing for analyzing CMR images spatially and temporally with multiscale feature learning...

PURPOSE: Based on the clinical need for grafts for vascular tissue regeneration, our group developed a customizable scaffold derived from the human amniotic membrane. Our approach consists of rolling the decellularized amniotic membrane around a mandrel to form a multilayered tubular scaffold with tunable diameter and wall thickness. Herein, we aimed to investigate if silica nanoparticles (SiNP) could enhance the adhesion of the amnion layers within these rolled grafts. METHODS: To test this, we assessed the structural integrity and mechanical properties of SiNP-treated scaffolds...

BACKGROUND: Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a common heritable myocardiopathy. Although HCM has been reported to be associated with many variants of genes involved in sarcomeric protein biomechanics, pathogenic genes have not been identified in patients with partial HCM. FARS2 (the mitochondrial phenylalanyl-tRNA synthetase), a type of mitochondrial aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, plays a role in the mitochondrial translation machinery. Several variants of FARS2 have been suggested to cause neurological disorders; however, FARS2-associated diseases involving other organs have not been reported...

In complex cardiovascular surgical reconstructions, conduit materials that avoid possible large-scale structural deformations should be considered. A fundamental mode of mechanical complication is torsional buckling which occurs at the anastomosis site due to the mechanical instability, leading surgical conduit/patch surface deformation. The objective of this study is to investigate the torsional buckling behavior of commonly used materials and to develop a practical method for estimating the critical buckling rotation angle under physiological intramural vessel pressures...

Hydrogen Peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) is a central oxidant in redox biology due to its pleiotropic role in physiology and pathology. However, real-time monitoring of H 2 O 2 in living cells and tissues remains a challenge. We address this gap with the development of an optogenetic hydRogen perOxide Sensor (oROS), leveraging the bacterial peroxide binding domain OxyR. Previously engineered OxyR-based fluorescent peroxide sensors lack the necessary sensitivity or response speed for effective real-time monitoring. By structurally redesigning the fusion of Escherichia coli (E...