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Abstract:
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Heart disease is one of the major causes of death in developing and industrialized countries . Myocardial infarction leads to remodeling of the left ventricle , which severely affects the pumping efficiency of the heart . In order to provide mechanical support to left ventricle the scaffold material should be elastic and mechanically strong . For the success of cardiac graft in vivo one of the important factor is ability of cardiac myocyte morphology to resemble that in vivo . The goal of this study is to build thick , prevascularized cardiac graft for myocardial infarction repair . Mechanical stress has been recognized as one of the important factor for the development of haemodynamically active tissue like myocardium . We designed micro pattern created scaffold from elastic , biodegradable , biocompatible material Crosslinked urethane dopped polyester (CUPE ) . To provide mechanical stretch in vitro we designed a bioreactor system . The neonatal rat derived cardiomyocytes were cultured on CUPE films and they were subjected to mechanical stress in the bioreactor . The results were compared with cells cultured on polymer films having micropattern on them and films without micropattern . The results indicated that cells that were subjected to stretch exhibited aligned , rod shaped elongated morphology compared to the unstretched samples . Moreover , stretched cells increased in size significantly and demonstrated hypertrophy . The cells on films without without micropattern on it was randomly oriented , sparsely distributed and could not show noticeable increase in size . Whereas , the cells cultured on polymer films with micropattern were comparatively more aligned and elongated . From our findings we concluded that alignment and stretch plays an important role in morphology of the cardiac cells . Also survival and growth of cells on CUPE films suggests that CUPE is a promising material for cardiac tissue engineering . |