UC Merced

According to the American Heart Association, one in three adults currently suffer from cardiovascular disease, with coronary heart disease being the most common. This chronic ailment commonly requires clinical intervention in order to prevent congestive heart failure, including daily medications, pacemakers, and surgical treatments. Cell therapy can potentially improve heart function after myocardial infarction (MI), but cell injection alone does not provide sufficient environmental support for the injected cells to survive [2]. Engineered cardiovascular tissue, if carefully designed, could replace the damaged heart tissue, reducing the need of many patients to undergo a whole heart transplant. Furthermore, designing human cardiac tissue in vitro could serve as an exciting model for both efficacy and toxicity pharmaceutical testing. Notable obstacles to achieving this ambitious goal include generating a cardiac cell source, patterning three-dimensional tissue to mirror its native architecture, and vascularizing the tissue to provide sufficient oxygen support. This study addresses each of these three obstacles: First, prevailing human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte (hPSC CM) differentiation protocols were compared for cell purity and efficiency. Second, the hPSC CMs were patterned using three distinct tissue engineering methods and analyzed for cell alignment and elongation. Third, a novel microfluidic device was designed for a perfusable endothelialized lumen through engineered cardiac tissue.