Fabrication of cardiac patch with decellularized porcine myocardial scaffold and bone marrow mononuclear cells

Department of Material Science and Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, OhioReceived 8 August 2009; revised 6 December 2009; accepted 21 January 2010Published online 8 April 2010 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jbm.a.32781Abstract: Tissue engineered cardiac grafts are a promisingtherapeutic mode for ventricular wall reconstruction.Recently, it has been found that acellular tissue scaffolds pro-vide natural ultrastructural, mechanical, and compositionalcues for recellularization and tissue remodeling. We thusassess the potential of decellularized porcine myocardium asa scaffold for thick cardiac patch tissue engineering. Myocar-dial sections with 2-mm thickness were decellularized using0.1% sodium dodecyl sulfate and then reseeded with differ-entiated bone marrow mononuclear cells. We found thatthorough decellularization could be achieved after 2.5 weeksof treatment. Reseeded cells were found to infiltrate and pro-liferate in the tissue constructs. Immunohistological stainingstudies showed that the reseeded cells maintained cardio-myocyte-like phenotype and possible endothelialization wasfound in locations close to vasculature channels, indicatingangiogenesis potential. Both biaxial and uniaxial mechanicaltesting showed a stiffer mechanical response of the acellularmyocardial scaffolds; however, tissue extensibility and ten-sile modulus were found to recover in the constructs alongwith the culture time, as expected from increased cellularcontent. The cardiac patch that we envision for clinical appli-cation will benefit from the natural architecture of myocardialextracellular matrix, which has the potential to promotestem cell differentiation, cardiac regeneration, and angio-genesis.